Histories and Theories of Urban Interventions

The Josep Lluis Sert Collection, 1925-1983. The Chimbote plan, 1948. Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

 

Harvard Graduate School of Design

HIS 4115: Histories and Theories of Urban Interventions

Course Instructor: Eve Blau

Course Description:

This course provides an introduction to the critical histories and theories of urban intervention and formation, and to the disciplinary practices of urban planning and urban design and the technological, institutional, and political contexts in which they operate over time and across cultures and geographies. Beginning in the mid 19th century, the course uses historical and theoretical readings and case studies of specific design and planning projects to ground theoretical ideas, modes and models of practice in the contexts in which those ideas and practices emerged and operated. The emphasis is on plural histories and plural readings of urban design and planning practices through multiple theoretical and critical lenses. The objectives are to introduce students to key episodes of transformation and paradigm shift that provide insight into the processes, debates, and projects that have shaped the urban planning and design fields over the past 150 years, and to situate those debates in larger discourses that foreground issues of social equity and identity, power, privilege, race, and gender. It connects the historical narrative to contemporary transformations and the challenges presented by emergent urban problems, crises, and struggles across places, territories and scales.

Topics include: industrialization and urbanization; the planned metropolis; Garden City; City Beautiful; modernist city; housing; Chicago School; racialization + suburbanization; Socialist city; Cold War politics + urban intervention in the Global South; CIAM and urban design; urban renewal, civil rights and the struggle for the city; withdrawal of the state; urban informality from above + below; data-based solutions + critiques; current conditions, issues + strategies.

The course is required for MUP and MAUD GSD students and serves as one of the required history/theory options for MDes/ULE students. It is open without prerequisites to all GSD students and by permission to students in other parts of the university.