GG4578: DEAD CITIES? URBAN GROWTH, CHANGE, DECAY AND DECLINE (2023-2024)

This course highlights the ways that cities and regions decline, shrink, and manage poverty. Often, urban analysis is focused on stories of growth in population and prosperity. But there are many places that, for structural, historical, or accidental reasons, are likely to see enduring poverty and/or shrinking populations for the foreseeable future. How should we think about these places, and how does that help us think about the development process in general?

For the first few sessions of the semester, we will briefly examine conventional narratives of urban, regional, and rural patterns of development. Students will be able to identify clearly how success is usually defined for different types of places. Having established the "normal" view of development, the course then examines a series of case studies in cities and regions around the world. Each of these case studies examines a place that, for varying reasons, is unlikely to improve along the conventional metrics of development. Yet people still make lives and livelihoods in these contexts, and it is possible to think of those lives and livelihoods as improved or worsened by state policy and the choices of private citizens.

These cases will be situated in a variety of locations around the world, including places like Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Glasgow, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Beijing. The course spends the bulk of its time on urban cases, but we will discuss peri-urban and rural contexts as well. In each location, we will examine the ways in which local patterns diverge from ideals of success, and the underlying causes of these patterns.

A key theme in the course is to think through what to do when "success" by conventional metrics is either undesirable or not plausible. Should we change the metrics? Are there better or worse ways for a city to shrink; or is all decline equivalently bad? If a government is incapable of addressing intractable poverty, what should it do?

Over the semester, students will develop an understanding of how urban and regional decline functions, and how to think about intervening in contexts of poverty and decline. The primary evaluation will be through a pair of projects in which students propose two different interventions to address specific problems in challenged cities. The course discussions will give students a framework for proposed interventions by closely examining what other actors in our various case sites have tried, and discussing how to evaluate the good and bad outcomes for cities where conventionally 'bad' outcomes are the default.

At the heart of the analysis for the semester is a difficult question: what are cities for? When economic success or population growth are not plausible, we are forced to consider more closely the other potential reasons that people choose to live in proximity with each other, and whether or not those are ‘worth’ continuing with in contexts of poverty or decline. In doing so, students will ultimately articulate what they believe are most important as values for development at the same time that they are able to better articulate the implicit values driving most urban development today.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

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There are no assessments for this course.