Introduction

Students are required to watch a short video that explains how this class works; and introduce yourself to your group members on Blackboard.

Navigate our class website. Please click this!

Topic 1: Modernity and modern cities

• Introduction to Urban Sociology: why cities matter?

• • Read
    • Introduction to Urban Sociology Overview 

• For further instructions, click this link –Week 1. Introduction: Modernity and modern cities

• Introduction to Urban Sociology

• • Read
    • Urbanization and Its Challenges
    • The era of industrialization
    • Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 & Photos

• For further instructions, click this link- Week 2: Juxtapositions and complexity of modern cities

• Urban residents in modern society

• • Read
    • “World’s Fair” in Britannica
    • Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life

Topic 2: Modern Consumerism 

• Modernity and consumption

• • Read
    • Thorstein Veblen. 1899. “Conspicuous Consumption“
    • James Surowiecki, 2009, “Inconspicuous Consumption”
    • Elsa Partan & Heather Goldstone, 2019, “Inconspicuous Consumption Still Has A Cost”

• For further instructions, click this link-Week 3: Modern Consumerism 

• Documentary: My Brooklyn.

• • Watch
    • We will watch this documentary together in class.
    • If you are absent or off campus, you will need to sign up for a Kanopy account using your City Tech email.
      • Click this for off-campus access.

Topic 3: Urbanism as a way of American life

• American tradition

• • Read
    • Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in  The City Reader, Pages 96-104
    • Click  The City Reader and go to Page 96.
    • NOTE: Click this link in order to learn about off-campus access.

• Reading Jane Jacobs

• • Watch
    • “Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses: Urban Fight of the Century”
  • Read
    • Jane Jacobs. 1961. “The Uses of Sidewalks: safety” in The City Reader, Pages 105-109
      • This chapter is available at City Tech’s library.
    • Click  The City Reader and go to Page 105.

Topic 4: Suburbanization

• Urbanism VS. Suburbanism

• • Read
    • Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, “Suburbanization in the United States after 1945“

• Suburbanization and how it has transformed a way of life in America.

• • Read
    • Shelley Nickles. 2002. “More is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America.” American Quarterly. 54(4):Pp 581-622

Topic 5:  May 68.     

• 09/29. It’s Monday at CUNY! As I promised, I will reduce the weekly work in half.
• May 68 & Lefebvre

• • Read
    • Events of May 1968 by Richard Wolin
  • Listen
    • In France, The Protests Of May 1968 Reverberate Today — And Still Divide The French in NPR.

Topic 6: New Urban Sociology

• May 68 & Lefebvre

• • Read
    •  “Henri Lefebvre: philosopher of the ordinary” by Michael Gardiner
    • “The Right to the City” in The Right to the City

• Urban Crisis from the Bronx to Los Angeles

• • Read
    • Zhandarka Kurti. “Why the Bronx Burned: an interview with Vivian Vazquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran” Jacobin
    • “Watts Riots of 1965” in Encyclopedia Britannica
    • Daniel Denvir. “1968 and the Invention of the American Police State,” City Lab

Topic 7: Poverty, Urban Ghettoes and the Inner City

• Urban Ghettos and the Inner City

• • Read
    • “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City: by Loic Wacquant and William Julius Wilson in The Urban Sociology Reader, pages 182-191
    • “Segregation and the Making of the Underclass” in The Urban Sociology Reader
      Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, pages 192-201

Topic 7: Urban Poverty -Eviction   

• Eviction

• • Read
    • Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city, excerpt (Blackboard)
    • “Stark Symbol of Pandemic in N.Y.: Homeless People Huddled on the Subway” in The New York Times

Topic 8: Gentrification

• Gentrification- Overview

• • Read
    • “Overview: The Gentrification Debates” “PART I: What is gentrification?: Definitions and key concepts” and “PART II: How, where and when does gentrification occur?” in The Gentrification Debates by Japonica Brown-Saracino
    • “Gentrification: Timeline”  in Next City
    • Gentrification in National Geographic

• Theories

• • Read
    • “Super-gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights, New York City,” in The Gentrification Debates: 45-50
    • “Toward a theory of gentrification: a back to the city movement by capital, not people,” by Neil Smith, in The Gentrification Debates: p71-85

Topic 9: Gentrification in New York City

• Commercial gentrification in New York City

• • Read
    • “Gentrification as Market and Place,” by Sharon Zukin, in The Gentrification Debates:37-44
    • Sharon Zukin. 2010. “How Brooklyn Became Cool” and “Why Harlem is Not a Ghetto.” Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places: Pp35-62 and 64-94
      • This book is required to purchase, but also reserved for the course at the library.
  • “When ‘Gentrification’ Isn’t About Housing” in The New York Times

• Creative class and new economy

• • Read
    • “Building the Creative Community” in The Gentrification Reader: p345-354
    • The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited in City Lab
    • ‘Everything is gentrification now’: but Richard Florida isn’t sorry in The Guardian
    • The Curse of the Creative Class by Steven Malanga in City Journal

Topic 10: Urban Branding

• Urban Branding

• • Read
    • Miriam Greenberg. 2010. “Branding, Crisis, and Utopia: Representing New York in the Age of Bloomberg”
    • Sewell Chan. 2008. “When New York Branded Its Way Out of Crisis” New York Times
    • Design Rush, 2018. “The I Love New York Logo Is An Iconic, Widely-Imitated Tourism Symbol.” Medium
    • Guardian Culture. 2015. “I Love New York: Meet Milton Glaser, creator of the ‘I Love NY’ logo.”
    • Archie D’Cruz. 2016. “Does ‘I Love New York’ Help Create a Brand for New York City?” Observer December 28, 2016

• Class activity: how will we brand New York City?

• • Read
    • Aarian Marshall. 2014. “A Brief History of City Branding Disasters.” City Lab

Topic 11: Global Cities

• Global Cities–production and consumption

• • Read
    • Sassen, Saskia. “The Global City: Introducing a Concept“
    • Jesus Leal Trujillo and Joseph Parilla. 2016. “Redefining Global Cities” Brookings Institute

• 11/26. Thanksgiving — college is closed

Topic 12:  Ethnicity and authenticity in ethnic enclaves 

• Ethnic enclaves: from traditional enclaves to new settlement patterns

• • Read
    • Wei Li’s “Ethnoburb versus Chinatown : Two Types of Urban Ethnic Communities in Los AngelesConceptual Framework : Ethnoburb” in The European Journal of Geography.
    • Timothy Egan’s “Rise of the Ethnoburbs” in The New York Times Opinion
    • Jinwon Kim’s  “Manhattan’s Koreatown as a Transclave: The Emergence of a New Ethnic Enclave in a Global City.” in City & Community 17(1): 276-295
• Ethnic food and authenticity in urban America
  • Read
    • Elisabeth Becker’s “Little of Italy? Assumed Ethnicity in a New York City Neighbourhood.” in Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(1): pp. 109–124.
    • “How Little Italy Became Little Albanian-Mexican Italy” in The New York Times

Week 16 (Dec 8-10): Whose city is it?

• Who can claim right to the city?

• • Read
    • David Harvey, “The Right to the City”
    • Jane Jacobs, “The kind of problem a city is,” in Death and Life of Great American Cities (Blackboard)

• 12/10. Future of our city – class activity.

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