The Shaping of Urban America

Catalog description

The course covers the physical evolution of the American urban landscape- its origins, planning, design, and development. In it we unpack the visions and values that have shaped settlement patterns on the land, from the pre-colonial era to the present day, probing the many forces-political, socio-economic, religious, technical- that have shaped American's urban and suburban environments. Throughout we will query the iterative, often conflicted nexus between space and society in American; for culture creates the spaces that then transform it. The urban landscapes forged over time reveal our collective past even as they exert formative pressure on the very identity of our polyglot nation.