Return to Geography Course Pages
| Instructor: Richard Walker email: walker@berkeley.edu office phone: 642-3901 office: 599 McCone office hours: T,Th 1-2 |
Class Location: 575 McCone Class Time: F 10-1 Course control number: 36736 Units: 4 |
|
Course may be repeated for credit. Two hours seminar and one hour consultation per week. Research seminar on selected topics in urban geography. |
| APPROACH AND ASSIGNMENTS Class meets every Friday, 10-1 in Room 575 McCone. This is a reading and discussion seminar, with intensive student participation. Students will introduce the weekly readings, lead discussion and summarize discussion. Two students will lead the class discussion each week (one before, one after break). They will be graded on how well they orchestrate the discussion, keep it moving, etc. The whole class will be evaluated on the discussions: those who talk too much or too little will lose points. There will be three readings each week, with the class divided in thirds, one reading per third. (The three groups will be arranged during the first class.) We will spend approximately one hour on each reading. Each week, one student will prepare a précis and discussion points on each group's reading, to be circulated by Wednesday at 9 pm (no exceptions), so that everyone can read the three pieces on Thursday. Each week, one student will prepare a summary of the portion of the class discussion pertaining to his/her group's reading. That will be due by Sunday night. All précises and summaries for the week will be graded and returned after class. At the end of term, students will prepare 5-10 page discussion papers pertaining to their own masters or doctoral project, and how the lessons of the course might inform their work. These are not research papers, but reflections on the course readings and debates. The last three weeks will be devoted to students' presenting their reflections in one-half hour segments. WEEKLY TOPICS AND READINGS Assigned books are on reserve in the Earth Sciences Library. My view is it is not asking too much for you to go to the library to read! (Very old-fashioned of me, but there it is). If you want to photocopy them, it's up to you -- I'm not interested, so don't ask me how you're going to do it, either individually or as a group. You can also order books very quickly on-line from Amazon.com or used from Alibris.com. Or, if you're planning ahead, from University Press Books on Bancroft or Collected Thoughts Bookshop on Euclid (that will take about two weeks, normally; less if it's something their distributor already has). 1. What's Urban Geography? Textbook Conventions Short, John Rennie. 1996. The Urban Order: An Introduction To Cities, Culture, And Power. Cambridge, Mass.:Blackwell Publishers. Ford, Larry. 1994. Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skid Rows, and Suburbs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2. Residential Landscapes Fishman, Robert. 1987. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Harris, Richard. 1996. Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Loeb, Carolyn. 2002. Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers' Subdivision in the 1920s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. 3. Industry Builds (Out) the City Scott, Allen. 1988. Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Scranton, Philip. 1989. Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885-1941. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Robert, ed. 2001. Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier. Special Issue of The Journal of Historical Geography. 27(1) (articles by Walker & Lewis, Lewis, Walker, Hise, and Muller) [also note chapter 3 of Harris's Unplanned Suburbs] 4. The Classic Downtown Holdsworth, Deryck and Gail Fenske. 1992. Corporate identity and the New York office building, 1895-1915. In: David Ward and Oliver Zunz, eds. The Landscape of Modernity. Russell Sage. 129-59. Benson, Susan. 1979. Palace of consumption and machine for selling: the American department store, 1880-1940. Radical History Review, 21:199-221. AND Domosh, Mona. 1990. Shaping the commercial city: retail districts in 19th century New York and Boston. Annals of the AAG. 80(2): 268-84. Groth, Paul. 1994. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johns, Michael. 2002. Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press. 5. Real Estate and Building Weiss, Marc. 1987. The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning. New York: Columbia University Press. Fainstein, Susan. 2001 [1994]. The City Builders: Property, Politics and Planning in London and New York. Second edition, revised. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press (orig: Blackwell) Mayer, Martin. 1978. The Builders: Houses, People, Neighborhoods, Governments, Money. New York: Norton. OR 6. Finance and Development D. Harvey, 1985. The urban process under capitalism In: The Urbanization of Capital. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pressm 1-31. AND Leitner, Helga. 1994. Capital markets, the development industry, and urban office market dynamics: rethinking building cycles. Environment and Planning A. 26: 779-802. AND Warf, Barney. 1994. Vicious circle: financial markets and commercial real estate in the United States. IN: Corbridge, S., Martin, R. and Thrift, N. eds. Money, Power and Space. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 309-26. AND Willis, Carol. 1995. Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in the New York and Chicago. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. first chapter. Foster, Peter, 1993. Towers of Debt: The Rise and Fall of the Reichmanns. Toronto: Key Porter Books. Mayer, Martin. 1990. The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery: The Collapse of the Savings and Loan Industry. New York: Charles Scribner’s. OR BRENNER? 7. Infrastructure and the City Below Miller, Donald. 1996. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. New York: Simon and Schuster. (Chapters xxx) Teaford, Jon. 1984. The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gandy, Matthew. 2002. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge: MIT Press. 8. Politics: Who Rules the City? Logan, John and Molotch, Harvey. 1986. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bridges, Amy. 1997. Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest. Princeton University Press. ?Dreier, Peter, John Mollenkpf and Todd Swanstrom. 2001. Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. ?[Jonas, Andrew and David Wilson, eds. 1999. The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Twenty Years Later. Albany: SUNY Press.] 9 Green Spaces & Urban Ecology Rome, Adam. 2001. The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of the American Enviornmental Movement. New York: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Mike. 1998. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt. Walker, Richard. In Review. The Country in the City: The Natural History of Urbanism in the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 10. Public Space & the Civic Polity Ryan, Mary. 1997. Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso. Harvey, David. 1985. Money, time, space and the city & Monument and myth. IN: Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1-35, 221-???. and Sorkin, Michael. ed. 1992. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press. (Selected Chapters) 11. Selling in the 20th Century City Longstreth, Richard. 1999. The Drive-In, The Supermarket, And The Transformation Of Commercial Space In Los Angeles, 1914-1941. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Schlosser, Eric. 2001. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side Of The All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Frieden, Bernard and Lynne B. Sagalyn. 1989. Downtown, Inc., How America Rebuilds Cities. Cambridge: MIT Press. 12. Race, Immigration and Urban Segregation Sugrue, Thomas. 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: PUP. Massey, Douglas and Denton, Nancy. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Waldinger, Roger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds. 1996. Ethnic Los Angeles. Newbury Park: Sage. 13. Central City Redevelopment & Gentrification Ley, David. 1997. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Neil. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. Hartman, Chester. 2002. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. (new edition) Berkeley: UC Press. |