Shaping the Future of New York City (CHC 20401; 0408)
Monday and Wednesday 3:30-4:45, NAC 4/148
The City College of New York, Macaulay Honors College
Instructor:
Jack Levinson, Sociology Department
Office:
NAC 6/139
Hours:
Monday 2:15-3:00 and 6:30-7:30 and by appointment
Shaping the Future of New York City
The goal of this seminar is to develop an understanding of the ongoing interplay of social, economic,
and political forces that shape the physical form and social dynamics of New York City. This will be
accomplished in five ways:
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By looking at certain important historical moments in urbanization, social policy formation and
its consequences, and the nature of city life and how it continually changes.
By studying major events in the production of space, such as the implementation of the Grid
Plan, the redevelopment of Times Square, the creation of Central Park, the role of social and
health reform movements in planning and the development of public health.
By considering New York City in the larger context of the region, the nation, and the world.
By examining the institutional agents of change in the city—federal, state, and city government,
public authorities, private sector interests, community boards, and community-based
organizations—in order to appreciate the roles people take or are given in the decision-making
processes of government.
By studying the operation of power and patterns of inequality, such as those based on race,
class, gender, and others.
Throughout the semester, seminar members will engage in a team research project organized by an
encompassing theme that draws on policy issues, the nature of policy and policy making, and the ways
in which the future of New York has been, and can be, envisioned.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
In the seminar, students will
1. Use primary sources, both qualitative and quantitative, especially in their research projects, to
understand community institutions, the local economy, and the role of government
2. Develop an understanding of how power differentially affects New York City’s people, its built
environment, and its institutions through site visits, case studies, or research projects.
3. Develop the ability to engage in key debates – past and present - about the future of the city in
class discussions and presentations as well as on the course web forum.
4. Develop an understanding of the formal and informal institutions underlying decision making in
the city by analyzing historical and contemporary planning and policy issues.
This semester, our overarching question is: how can we shape the future or even study it?
Naturally, we will turn to the past but that never provides simple answers. In part, we will turn to the
past to understand how the future has been imagined at other times. We also turn to the past to
understand that, in order to think about the present – let alone take on the future! – the past must be
represented in ways that make it relevant. To that end, we will use a range of material that illustrates
different ways in which futures have been envisioned before. We will begin with nineteenth-century
intellectual and political responses to urbanization, among other things, and how these responses
shaped the future as well as the past and the present – then and now. The visionary arguments and
nostalgic reflections of architects, urban planners, artists, social scientists and others will be juxtaposed
to material on specific New York City issues. These include health and disease, Progressive era social
reform and its legacies, infrastructure transformation and urban renewal in the mid-twentieth century,
and, since the 1970s, responses to changing ideas and experiences of order and disorder.
Required text:
White, E.B. Here is New York. New York: The Little Bookroom, 1999 [1949]. ISBN 1-892145-02-2
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
REGULAR POSTINGS (30% of final grade): For nearly each week of the semester, there will be a
“Discussion Board” on our class page for posting an analysis about the assigned readings and class
discussions. It will generally be open from Monday to Monday but this depends on what we are doing
in class. If you are unable to post on one of the discussion boards you will have forfeited that
opportunity. (Once a discussion board is closed you will not be able to post and you will not be
permitted to scramble later and make up posts you have missed.) Once a discussion board is locked, it
will remain available for reading but not for posting.
You are required to contribute at least one post per discussion board of roughly 300 words. We have
discussed what I expect from you and additional instructions are posted on the first discussion board. In
general, I expect the discussion boards to be an active critical dialogue that will both inform and be
informed by our discussion in class. I expect you to engage in debate and reflection but it is imperative
to stick to the written and visual texts at hand. That is, do not use the web dialogue simply to wax into
the abstract over your own personal musings independently of the material. The ideas and arguments
offered by our course material (and in class discussion) must be the fundamental basis of the comments
posted.
FINAL PROJECT/INDIVIDUAL PAPERS (30% of the final grade): This is the collaborative project
you will present at the MHC conference May 6-9. Dates for abstract deadlines and conference
schedule TBA. Your papers (no less than ten pages) will be due in hard copy right before the
conference.
PROJECT IDEA: By March 1, everyone must post a one paragraph project idea on the “class
consciousness.” From there, we will discuss the connections between project ideas and form
appropriate groups.
PERSONAL ESSAY (35% of the final grade): Due on May 25. Guidelines will be provided
separately.
Schedule of Readings
NOW, THEN, AND THE FUTURES OF PROGRESS PAST
Monday January 30:
What’s up?
Monday and Wednesday February 1 and 6:
Nisbet, Robert “The Two Revolutions” in The Sociological Tradition New York: Basic Books, 1966.
Wednesday February 15:
Simmel, Georg “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Originally published in 1903.
Nemerov, Howard “Moment” New and Selected Poems Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1960.
Tuesday and Wednesday February 21 and 22 (Tuesday is Monday at CUNY!):
Marinetti, F.T. “The Futurist Manifesto” (1909)
Wilson, Richard “America and the Machine Age.” Chapter 1 in The Machine Age in America, 19181941 edited by R. Wilson, D. Pilgrim, and D. Tashjian. New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art/Harry N.
Abrams Publishers.
Whitman, Walt “Give me the Splendid Silent Sun” and Crane, Hart “To Brooklyn Bridge” (handouts)
NEW YORK IN AND OF: CITIES FRAMED, REMEMBERED, EMBRACED, ABANDONED
Monday and Wednesday February 27 and 29:
White, E.B. Here is New York New York: The Little Bookroom, 1999. Originally published in 1949.
Hughes, Langston “When the Negro was in Vogue” excerpt from The Big Sea (1940)
Didion, Joan “Goodbye to All That” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1967.
Berts, Jean-Michel “The Light of New York.” Queen’s Quarterly 114/3 (Fall 2007)
Recommended: Kazin, Alfred A Walker in the City. New York: Mariner Books, 1969. Originally
published in 1951.
Monday March 5:
Discussion of project ideas and group formation/formation of groups. Suggestions for general themes
are encouraged but individual project ideas must be on the “class consciousness” discussion board by
March 1.
REPRESENTATIVE CITY/CITY REPRESENTED
Monday March 12:
Conaway, Carol “Crown Heights: Politics and Press Coverage of the Race War that Wasn’t.” Polity
(32)1:93-118, Autumn 1999.
Screening
Wednesday March 14:
Taylor, William “New York and the Origin of the Skyline – The Commercial City as Visual Text.”
Chapter 2 in Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.
Blake, A. “Antiurbanism, New York, and the Early Twentieth Century American National Imagination”
In Fleeing the City: Studies in the Culture and Politics of Antiurbanism ed. M.J. Thompson New York:
Pagrave Macmillan, 2009.
Monday and Wednesday March 19 and 21:
Spann, Edward K. “The Greatest Grid: the New York Plan of 1811” Chapter 1 in Two Centuries of
American Planning, edited by Daniel Schaffer, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
Trachtenberg, Alan “The Rainbow and the Grid” American Quarterly 16(1), 1964, pp. 3-19.
Monday and Wednesday March 26 and 28:
Selections from Koolhaas and Esperday (TBA)
Before March 19, everyone is required to attend the exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York
called The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. We will discuss this requirement
further in class. http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/current/The-Greatest-Grid.html
IN PROGRESS: HEALTH/NATURE AND/AS BUILT ENVIRONMENTS
Monday and Wednesday April 2 and 4:
Olmsted, Frederick Law “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns.” Address to the American Social
Science Association (1870)
Peterson, Jon “The Impact of Sanitary Reform upon American Urban Planning, 1840-1890.” Journal
of Social History 13(1), Autumn 1979, pp. 83-103.
Plunz, David “Early Precedents.” Chapter 1 in A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type
and Social Change in the American Metropolis New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Recommended: Riis, Jacob How the Other Half Lives (1890) [E-version through CCNY library]
SPRING RECESS April 6-15
FUTURE AND PRESENT IMAGINED AND REAL
Monday and Wednesday April 16 and 18:
Le Corbusier excerpt from The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (1929)
Mumford, Lewis “What Is a City?” Architectural Record (1937)
Monday and Wednesday April 23 and 25:
Fotsch, Paul “The Building of a Superhighway Future at the New York World’s Fair.” Cultural Critique
No. 48, Spring 2001, pp. 65-97.
Goodman, Paul and Percival Goodman “Banning Cars from Manhattan” (1961)
Recommended: Firth, Ian and Marianne Kramer “Case Study in Ecosystems and Preservation: Lessons
Learned from New York's Central Park.” APT Bulletin 30(1) Landscape Preservation Comes of Age,
pp. 15-20.
Monday and Wednesday April 30 and May 2:
Public triumph or humiliation! Groups must be prepared for full dress rehearsals of their conference
presentations.
CITIES ACTUALLY
Monday and Wednesday May 7 and 9:
Jacobs, Jane from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
Muschamp, Herbert “The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle.” The New York Times January 8, 2006.
Monday April 14:
Teacher’s Surprise!