Title:            HISTORY AND THEORY OF CITY PLANNING

 

Number:     PPS 650 / AST 650

 

Type:           Graduate seminar (required for PPA, elective for AST)

 

Synopsis:       

This course surveys the origins, development, and practice of city planning over the last two centuries.  The focus of the course is on the United States, but in comparative perspective.  Students examine planning in the broader context of the development of cities, their cultures, and their built environments.  Rather than a taken for granted municipal function, students approach city planning first and foremost as a historically constructed intellectual enterprise, as a mode of discourse and method of envisioning the city.  The various tools in the planners kit, then, emerge as responses to changes in the urban and metropolitan landscape, as well as from changes in the very perception of the city.  The course contends that city planning is ultimately a search for a moral and political order on the land, a struggle by a range of interests over time for control over the destiny of modern urban society.

 

Links:           Syllabus