4.241J | Spring 2025 | Graduate

The Making of Cities

Readings

Adams, Ross Exo, “Natura Urbans, Natura Urbanata: Ecological Urbanism, Circulation, and the Immunization of Nature," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2014): 12–29. 

Aristotle, Politics. Book 7, chapters 4–7

Barles, Sabine, and Laurence Lestel, “The Nitrogen Question. Urbanization, Industrialization, and River Quality in Paris 1830–1939,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (2007): 794–812.  

Batty, Michael, “The Unpredictable City,” in The Computable City: Histories, Technologies, Stories, Predictions (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024). 

Benevolo, Leonardo, “Roman Urbanism,” in The Origins of Modern Town Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).

Boyer, Christine, “The City as a Machine,” in Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 

Cacciari, Massimo, “The Myth of the Growing City,” in Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

Castoriadis, Cornelius, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 9, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 94–114.  

De Bruijne, G.A., “Colonial Cities and the Post-Colonial World,” in Robert Ross and Gerard J. Telkamp, eds., Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1985). 

de Landa, Manuel, ”Geological History 1000–1700,” in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000), 26–56. 

Doxiadis, Constantinos, “Anthropocosmos Model,” Ekistics 72 (2005): 430–435.  

Easterling, Keller, “Zone,” in Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), 22–62.  

Gandy, Matthew, “Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space, and the Modern City,” City 8, no. 3 (2004): 363–379. 

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow, “Imaginary Cities. Eurasia’s First Urbanites—in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine, and China—and How They Built Cities Without Kings,” in The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 276–328.  

Kipfer, Stephan, “Mixing It Up: Demolition and Counter-Revolution in Greater Paris,” in Urban Revolutions: Urbanisation and (Neo-)Colonialism in Transatlantic Context (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 200–239. 

Kitto, H.D.F., “The Polis,” in Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio, eds., Urban Politics (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010), 1–12.  

Mattern, Shannon, “Urban Technologies,” in Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)  

Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Nuttall, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis," Public Culture vol. 16, no. 3 (2004): 347–372. 

More, Thomas, Utopia, excerpts.  

Mumford, Lewis, “The Crystallization of the City,” in The City in History: Its Origins, Transformations, and its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc, 1961), 29–54.  

Norberg-Schulz, Christian, Meaning in Western Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1975), 81–88.  

Ogilvie, Sheilagh, “Guilds, Cities, and Trade,” in Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).  

Ong,Aihwa, “Worldling Cities, or the Art of Being Global,” in Worldling Cities. Asian Experiments in the Art of Being Global, Ananya Roy and Aihwa Hong, ed. (Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 1–26. 

Picon, Antoine, “Nineteenth-Century Urban Cartography and the Scientific Ideal: The Case of Paris,” Osiris (2003): 135–149.  

Rossi, Aldo, “The Roman Forum” and “Monuments: Summary of the Critique of Context,” in The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 [1966]) 

Rowe, Colin, “Collision City and the Politics of Bricolage,” in Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 

Sassen, Saskia, “Medieval City-States and Economic Networks,” in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)  

Secchi, Bernardo, “A New Urban Question 3: When, Why and How Some Fundamental Metaphors Were Used,” in Metaphors in Architecture and Urbanism vol. 19 (2014): 123–32,  

Sennet, Richard, “The Spaces of Democracy,” in Democracy and Urban Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024)  

Sevilla Buitrago, Álvaro, “Gramsci and Foucault in Central Park: Environmental Hegemonies, Pedagogical Spaces and Integral State Formations,” Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 35, no.1 (2017): 165–183. 

Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro, “Planning as a Historical Project,” in Against The Commons: A Radical History Of Urban Planning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 1–30.  

Sheppard, Eric, Helga Leitner, and Anant Maringanti. “Provincializing Global Urbanism: A Manifesto,” Urban Geography 34.7 (2013): 893–900.  

Varzi, Achille C., “What Is a City?,” Topoi 40 (2021): 399–408.  

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914), 17–35. 

Wood, Ellen Meiksins, “The Polis and the Peasant Citizen,” in Peasant-Citizen and Slave. The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London: Verso, 1988), 101–125.

Course Info

As Taught In
Spring 2025
Level
Learning Resource Types
Written Assignments with Examples