Topics: Urban Culture and Society: Finance, Race and Space

Catalog description

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Current topic description: This course examines the relationship between finance, race, and space. Students will draw on multiple disciplinary approaches to understand how the development of financial tools, mechanisms, political-legal arrangements, and historical patterns of accumulation shape and are shaped by racialized accumulation, displacement, and racial violence. Topics include financialization, gentrification, accumulation by dispossession, and the political economy of credit and debt. Assignments include a research paper. Counts towards Africana Studies. Current topic description: This seminar examines legal issues encountered in the built environment. Cities and other urbanizations are built upon legal structures that assign (or deny) rights and space, finance and govern public and private projects, and order the city on multiple scales from neighborhood to city to metropolitan sprawl. Drawing on materials from planning, business, community development and social sciences, this seminar looks at topics such as zoning, home ownership, land use, and federal policies to understand how law shapes the city and how we understand, use, resist or change these legal tools.