Urban Studies 200 / Geography 250
Cities
Discussion Guide
Welcome to the discussion sections for Urban Studies 200 and Geography 250! These discussion sections are intended to provide a friendly, supportive setting where you can a) ask questions about topics covered in class, b) explore a few topics in greater depth, c) share ideas for the written projects, and d) get advice on preparing for the examinations.
The meeting times and locations for discussion sections are listed in the course schedule.
If the only discussion section that fits your schedule is already full, then feel free to register for any one of the sections the system permits, and then attend the section that actually fits your schedule. If the system won't let you in to any of the discussion sections, contact Jennifer Hamilton, jennifer.hamilton@geog.ubc.ca, and she should be able to get you in.
It doesn't matter which discussion section you're registered for. But you must attend the same section consistently throughout the term.
Below is a tentative schedule for the discussion meetings. You are free to "look ahead" on the schedule, but keep in mind that this is a guide, not a straightjacket: things will change depending on your interests, the questions you ask during discussion sections, and the topics you and your Teaching Assistants find most interesting! Plans for each weeks' discussion sections are usually finalized about a week in advance.
Tentative Schedule
Discussion 1, week of September 3. Introductions.
Meet the professor. Meet the Teaching Assistants. Most importantly, meet your colleagues!
Discussion 2, week of September 10. Barns in the City.
Outline of the purpose of the discussion groups, and then a brief discussion of each of our "urban biographies." Before you come to the discussion section, you should read enough of the following essay so that you remember the four main types of seminars, and the verb "Socratease":
The Kahn essay introduces the concept of barn-raising, a valuable metaphor which helps to inspire friendly, productive, and useful discussions in the seminar room. Then go around the table, and tell us about the city or cities you know and love; maybe this will be the city where you were born and grew up, or maybe there are two or more cities that are important to you. Pass around a copy of the world outline map, and mark down your city or cities. Write small so everyone can fit something in...!
Discussion 3, week of September 17. Writing.
A few years ago, a student sent me a link to "A Vision of Students Today," a short video produced by students in the Digital Ethnography program at Kansas State University. "Digital ethnography?" I wondered. But one of the things that intrigued me was this: the students in that class said they write about ten times as much e-mail as formal course writing. Why?
This week we'll have some conversations about writing. One of the most challenging things about urban studies is making sense of the overwhelming experience of cities -- in ways that can be distilled into clear, coherent written language. It's not always easy, but it is rewarding, engaging, and fun. And some of the most famous urbanists are also some of the best writers!
For today's discussion, please read and reflect on a short quote from Howard Becker.
Howard Becker on writing and revision. Consider these reflections from Howard Becker, one of the most famous figures in the "Chicago School" of sociology and urban studies.
"I have a lot of trouble with students (and not just students) when I go over their papers and suggest revisions. They get tongue-tied and act ashamed and upset when I say that this is a good start, all you have to do is this, that and the other and it will be in good shape. Why do they think there is something wrong with changing what they have written? Why are they so leery of rewriting?"
"...often, students and scholars balk at rewriting because they are subordinates in a hierarchical organization, usually a school. The master-servant or boss-worker relationship characteristic of schools gives people a lot of reasons for not wanting to rewrite, many of them quite sensible. Teachers and administrators intend their schools' systems of reward to encourage learning. But those systems usually teach undergraduates, instead, to earn grades rather than to be interested in the subjects they study or to do a really good job ... Students try to find out, by interrogating instructors and relying on the experience of other students, exactly what they have to do to get good grades. When they find out, they do what they have learned is necessary, and no more. Few students learn (and here we can rely on our own memories as students and teachers) that they have to rewrite or revise anything. On the contrary, they learn that a really smart student does a paper once, making it as good as possible in one pass...."
"Schools also teach students to think of writing as a kind of test: the teacher hands you the problem, and you try to answer it, then go on to the next problem. One shot per problem. Going over it is, somehow, 'cheating,' especially when you have had the benefit of someone else's coaching after your first try. It's somehow no longer a fair test of your own abilities. You can hear your sixth grade teacher saying, 'Is this all your own work?' What a student might think of as coaching and cheating, of course, is what more experienced people think of as getting some critical response from informed readers. ... "
"Students don't know, never seeing their teacher, let alone textbook authors, at work, that all these people do things more than once..."
"..revising and editing happen to everyone, and are not emergency procedures undertaken only in cases of scandalously unprofessional incompetence."
Source: Howard S. Becker (1986). Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book or Article. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, quotes from pp. 43-45.
Optional: If you're interested in more of Howie's scholarship and thoughts, then see this.
Optional: If you want to learn a few rules of grammar by reading what happens when the rules are broken, see William Safire (1979). "On Language: The Fumblerules of Grammar." New York Times Magazine, November 4, p. SM4.
Discussion 4, week of September 24. Community.
This week in the lecture, one of our topics will focus on theories of urban community. "Community" has been in the English language since the 14th century. The term refers to a group of people who share: 1. a physical space or location, 2. a trait, preference, or activity, or 3. a strong identity, culture, and history. But that "or" really matters -- these different uses of the term make it particularly flexible, and thus often confusing in how people talk about life in cities. The meaning of the word has changed over time, and not everyone uses it in the same way. The influential literary theorist Raymond Williams (1983, p. 76) notes that "The contrast, increasingly expressed in [the 19th century], between the more direct, more total and therefore more significant relationships of community and the more formal, more abstract and more instrumental relationships of state, or of society in its modern sense, was influentially formalized by Tönnies (1887) as a contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellshaft, and these terms are now sometimes used, untranslated, in other languages."
In lecture, we'll talk about Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellshaft (society), and how this distinction was shaped by the dramatic urbanization that changed the worlds of Tönnies and other European writers.
For the discussion section conversations, however, I'd like you to reflect on what "community" means to you in your urban experiences in Vancouver. Raymond Williams (1983, p. 76) also wrote that "Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. ... What is most important, perhaps, is that ... it seems never to be used unfavourably."
So: Your mission is this: read a recent editorial in the Vancouver Sun, and then arrive at the discussion section prepared to discuss it. What do you think of Bramham's interpretation of community? How is she using the term? Based on your experiences in Vancouver (or any other city), how do you respond to her interpretations -- her opening declaration, for example, that "Vancouver is not a friendly place." -- and her suggestions for what to do to build community?
Daphne Bramham (2012). "Lonely in Vancouver? Maybe it's not as bad as numbers indicate." Vancouver Sun, September 20, p. A11.
Source for Raymond Williams quotes: Raymond Williams (1983). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 75-76.
[No discussion the week of October 1. Midterm examination.]
Discussion 5, week of October 8. Photography in the City.
Not long ago, an editor asked me to write an essay for a special issue of a journal focused on "The Wire," a television drama about life and politics in a deindustrialized city in the United States -- Baltimore. The editor, the talented and dynamic Bob Catterall, had good timing: although I had seen the series -- it became wildly popular among academics, especially academics interested in urban studies -- I had never considered writing anything academic or theoretical about it. But only a few weeks before Bob got in touch, I had picked up an entire book about the series thanks to an impulse buy. Jatinder and I had been traveling, and I saw "The Wire" on big block letters on a book for sale on the busy concourse in O'Hare, outside Chicago, and figured this was a good way to escape and satisfy guilty some guilty pleasures on the next long flight.
Bob gave me a tight deadline: I think it was just about two weeks. Three things popped into mind. One: The cinematography of The Wire is impressive, and "cinematography" is really just a fancy way of saying "moving pictures." Two: I have some pictures from Baltimore when I went to a conference there in the spring of 2008. Three: If I write something fun for this, then I'll get to show it to my brilliant colleagues in the Cities class!
So, for this week, I'd like you to read the essay I wrote on urban photography, using The Wire and Baltimore as ways of getting the conversation going.
Ideally, of course, everyone will have time to read the whole article. But I'm realistic, and I know you're busy. So I'll provide a road map to the article, to help you decide which parts to examine closely if you don't have time for a full read. I ask that everyone read through the first section -- the introduction, from pages 497 to 501. Then read at least one of the other sections of the article, as listed below:
- Introduction, pages 497-501.
- Reconsidering Critical Visual Theory, pages 501-503
- Beyond Disillusionment, pages 503-504
- Things Pictures Don't Tell Us, pages 504-510
- In Search of Baltimore, pages 510-524
Each of the photo captions here provides a "mini photo essay" -- a short sample city photo essay that should inspire you to think of ways you can do background research on a city photo you've taken.
- Conclusions, pages 524-524
Discussion 6, week of October 15. Louis Wirth, Amanda Todd, and Facebook World City.
Louis Wirth died long ago. Amanda Todd died last Wednesday. You are alive. And you now know enough about urban studies to help us think through the positive and negative implications of the social web for an urbanizing world.
I know you're busy, so I'll help you budget your time for preparations. First, take ten minutes to read and reflect on the abstract of Bill Bunge's article, "The Geography of Human Survival." You can read further if you'd like, but there's a lot of detail, some of it is a bit strange, and I know you're busy...
So, ten minutes to read and reflect on the abstract of this:
Bunge, William (1973). "The Geography of Human Survival." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63(3), 275-295.
Now, spend eight minutes and fifty-three seconds to view the video below.
Gillian Shaw and Lori Culbert (2012). "Port Coquitlam Teen Driven to Death by Cyberbullying." Vancouver Sun, October 12.
Now spend ten minutes reading and reflecting on this:
Krissy Darch (2012). "Why Isn't Anyone Talking about the Misogyny Involved in Amanda Todd's Life and Death?" Vancouver Observer, October 12.
Finally, spend about thirty minutes reading through a paper I wrote with Larissa Zip, who took this class last year. For her written project for the course, Larissa took up one of my suggestions, the "Louis Wirth on Facebook" idea (see the description on the right). She submitted a first draft, and then Sage Ponder, our talented and brilliant Teaching Assistant, provided comments and recommendations for improvement. Larissa worked hard on major revisions to the paper, and I was impressed with the revised version. I asked Larissa for permisson to post her essay as an example for future students, and she agreed -- and I also asked her if I could revise the paper -- keeping her name first as a coauthor. She agreed, and so this past summer I spent a bit of time reading, thinking, and revising. Here's the new version, which we've sent to a journal in the hopes of getting it published:
Optional: If you want to explore some of these issues further, here's what I'd recommend. First, read Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life." Second, re-read Barbara Phillips's discussion of community, specifically pages 166 to 181, then pages 250 to 251. How do the classic theories of urbanization, anomie, and the 'segmented self' help us understand the strange new "communities" of a web-connected urban world? Connect with some of the empirical specifics of Amanda Todd's horrible experience, and the ensuing public discussion of it -- much of the discussion taking place, of course, online. Here are a few other sources that might be useful in your exploration:
Rosie DiManno (2012). "Amanda Todd Suicide: The Web Has a Lot to Answer for." The Toronto Star, October 12.
Adrian Chen (2012). "Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, the Biggest Troll on the Web." Gawker, October 12.
Rachel Pain, Sue Grundy, Sally Gill, Elizabeth Towner, Geoff Sparks, and Kate Hughes (2005). "So Long as I Take my Mobile: Mobile Phones, Urban Life and Geographies of Young People's Safety." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(4), 814-830.
[Note: Everything in the schedule below this line is tentative. Cities are always changing, and so that means a Cities class has to change too to stay relevant and interesting, to engage with current events, and the conversations we have in discussion sections! Feel free to look ahead, but keep in mind that the schedule of topics will change...]
Urban Archaeology and Contemporary Relevance.
Scholarship on ancient cities has been shaped by debates in archaeology for many years, with the most important shift prompted by the excavation of Çatal Hüyük in the 1960s -- a site that contradicted the conventional wisdom on when the first cities emerged, and that unsettled assumptions about the relationships between societal change and urbanization. The debate continues today, with new archaeological excavations and new scholarship providing insights from more and more sites around the world, in turn raising important new theoretical questions. But what is the contemporary and popular relevance of specialized scholarly debates over cities that emerged thousands of years ago?
For today's discussion, you should take a look at the essay below. Read the first three pages or so closely, and then skim through the rest:
Michael E. Smith (2010). "Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues?" Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20(2), 229-253.
What is "recentism"? Why is it important to explore the connections between ancient and contemporary cities?
You may also be interested in recent updates from the excavations begun by Mellaart in the early 1960s:
SimCity ... for real?
This week we jump forward thousands of years from our discussion of urban archaeology, to consider some of the newest ideas about how to organize the complexity of urban life. For years, the popular SimCity series of games has put people in the unrealistic but fun position of designing cities and then watching the consequences of various decisions. But now a technology company is planning to build a real version of a SimCity. What does it mean to create an entire city-as-a-laboratory, to study the relations between human behavior and computer-driven systems for power, transportation, and surveillance? Is the city defined by the technologies that shape its form and function, or is it fundamentally a social phenomenon?
In today's discussions, the TAs will also provide advice on preparing for the mid-term examination.
Discussion of Project Option: City Book Review.
This week we begin exploring the choices you have for written projects in this course. You should first read the 'General Guidelines,' which apply to all written submissions. Apologies for the strident tone of some of these guidelines: the projects are intended to be enjoyable opportunities for creativity and discovery. But many thousands of last-minute, late-night emails have made it clear that it's best to provide detailed guidelines up front. You'd be surprised if you saw some of the bizarre, 3:00 AM emails we've received from students who don't know what a scholarly source is, or who can't find any information on their chosen topic, or who missed all the opportunities for advice and help during office hours or the discussion sections.
Then read the background paper for the book review option:
Discussion of Project Option: Writing the City with Light.
Discussion of Project Option: City Media Analysis.
Place and Sense of Place.
Place and "sense of place" are seemingly natural, self-apparent notions. Indeed all of us have developed deep attachments to place. And yet this is one of those concepts that seems so self-evident that most people don't really stop to consider the significance of their experiences and attachments.
Place is a portion of geographic space invested with human experience and meaning. The portion of space can be small or large -- it may be a neighborhood, or perhaps it's an entire city. Maybe it's a region, or a province, or a nation-state, or a broad continent or world region. It's less important to worry about the details of how to define the particular portion of space: what matters more is the production of human meanings through experience, knowledge, perception, and memory. That's what turns space into place.
The concept of place helps us to understand the widespread misunderstanding of what geography is all about. Not long ago, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente (2011) was puzzled by the focus of a book edited by geographers. "Like most people," Wente (2011) wrote, "I was under the impression that geographers studied rocks and trees and ethnic groups and the kinds of things you read about in National Geographic." Wente isn't entirely wrong -- geographers do indeed study all those things. But the impression is that all those things are static, unchanging -- that once you learn to identify the countries on the map, and remember the key facts about them, you're done. Wrong. Places are always changing. It's not just that countries and cities are always growing, and new cities and new countries are appearing on the map. That's important, but there are other changes as well. The meanings that individuals invest in particular spaces change over time, and often this happens for large social groups and even for significant sections of an entire national society. Places are always in a state of becoming, because meanings and perceptions of spaces are always changing. And since individuals are also changing over time, it means that the human experience of time is also an experience of place. Every biography is also a geography. And once spaces and places involve individuals and society, it becomes clear that geography cannot be confined to the study of simple factual trivia: it also has to include the full range of social and political conflicts that shape contests over particular spaces and spatial practices. This is why we need subfields that help us question our assumptions -- it's why it's important to have a field, for example, called feminist geography (see Feminist Geography Collective, 2011, for a response to Wente, 2011).
There's a vast literature on place and sense of place in geography and urban studies. We don't have a lot of time to sift through this vast literature, of course, but fortunately we do have a nice, short summary. Your mission for this week involves two steps: First, go to the general reference section of the Geographic Information Centre, in Room 112 of the Geography building, and read George Henderson's (2009) valuable definition of "place." Second, look through a website recently created by a group of critical artists and designers in New York City working to question our understandings of public space. How does the #whOWNSpace project illustrate each of the three facets of place defined by Henderson? After reading about the #whOWNSpace project and Henderson's definition, can you write a sentence or two that describes your experience of a particular urban place? Perhaps you can sketch out your experiences of urban public space in ways like the maps created on the #whOWNSpace project...
Henderson (2009). "Place." In Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael J. Watts, and Sarah Whatmore, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th Edition. Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 539-540.
Feminist Geography Collective (2011). "An Open Letter to Margaret Wente in Defence of Geography and Our Space for Critical Thinking." The Mark, October 25.
Discussion of Project Option: Mapping Cities of the Mind.
Discussion of Project Option: City Power Networks.
If possible, take a few minutes to learn about at least a few of the candidates for Mayor or City Council -- for any city where you are eligible to vote, or where you have some political interests or loyalties. You don't have to spend a lot of time on this -- just try to get to know a few of the candidates, and try to see how their positions or statements illustrate the elitist, pluralist, growth machine, and regime models of community power.
If you will be eligible to vote in the next round of municipal elections, then these resources may be helpful:
Discussion and Advice on Projects, and Preparing for the Final Examination.
City Discussion: Vancouver March for Housing, April, 2009 (Elvin Wyly)
"Cities are unfinished stories..." Paul Chatterton (2010). "The Urban Impossible: A Eulogy for the Unfinished City." City 14(3), 234-244, quote from p. 235.
"...for people to have the education to understand a worldview beyond the city, communication is vital. The limited ways to communicate with those around us must always be protected. In a largely urban population, we have to not lose sight of the role 'graffiti' plays in this." Tom Civil (2010). "Learning the City." City 14(1-2), 160-161, quote from p. 161.
"The mortality of persons contrasts sharply with the immortality of cities." James J. Vance (1990). The Continuing City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, quote from p. 4.
"A new spirit pervades the city of to-day -- a spirit of hopefulness, of progressiveness and genuine interest in the common welfare." Horatio M. Pollock and William S. Morgan (1913). Modern Cities. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, quote from p. 1.
"Today we begin to see that the improvement of cities is no matter for small one-sided reforms: the task of city design involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization. We must alter the parasitic and predatory modes of life that now play so large a part, and we must create, region by region, continent by continent, an effective symbiosis, or co-operative living together." Lewis Mumford (1938). The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace, quote from p. 9.
"...you -- kind reader -- are invited to participate directly in discovering the metropolis. I hope that carrying out the projects will bring the metropolis alive, encouraging serious discussion and even theory building. I would like to know what you find when doing the projects." E. Barbara Phillips (2009). City Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in the Global Society, Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, quote from p. xlvi.
"Cities are civilization." Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds. (2005). The City Reader. New York: Routledge, quote from p. 21.
The Poverty Olympics, February 2009 (Elvin Wyly)
"...place has been shown to be a crucial element in the bonding process -- more so perhaps for the working class than the capital-owning classes -- by the explosion of the international economy and the destructive effects of deindustrialization upon old communities. When capital has moved on, the importance of place is more clearly revealed."
Raymond Williams (1989). Resources of Hope. London: Verso, p. 242, quoted in David Harvey (1996). Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
CopyLeft 2012 Elvin K. Wyly
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
Miloon Kothari (center) with allies, analysts, activists, and organizers at the Purple Thistle Centre, discussing the case for the Right to Housing, July 2012 (Elvin Wyly).
Discussion Question: Is housing a commmodity or a right?
Charlie Smith (2012). "Expert Rips Interim Report of the Mayor's Task Force on Housing Affordability." Georgia Straight, July 12.
"CITY"
CITY QUOTES
"Every snapshot is a debt, a promise made to the subject. I've been sliding deeper into bankruptcy for years."
Elvin Wyly (2010). "Things Pictures Don't Tell Us: In Search of Baltimore." City 14(5), 497-528.
- Project Idea: Louis Wirth on FaceBook. Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life" is a classic that inspired and shaped generations of students fascinated with how cities changed human relations and people's experience of daily life. Read Wirth's classic article slowly, and carefully. Then read the profile of Mark Zuckerberg, and write a paper that addresses the following question: if Wirth were alive today, and he decided to sit down and rewrite his article to analyze the implications of social networking technologies like FaceBook, Google Plus, and all those other new sites, what would he write?
If you choose this project, avoid the temptation to write all the details you know and love about how facebook works. Put your effort into thinking about the underlying meaning of the social relations made possible by all those little details. How would Wirth regard the consequences for peoples' experience of contemporary urban life?
A.G. Sulzberger (2011). "In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious." New York Times, September 19.
Jenna Wortham (2011). "Shunning Facebook, and Living to Tell About It." New York Times, December 13.
"He first read the Aeneid while he was studying Latin in high school, and he recounted the story of Aeneas's quest and his desire to build a city that, he said, quoting the text in English, "knows no boundaries in time and greatness." (Vargas, 2010, p. 64).
"To survive, we must learn to worship children, not machines."
Quick Links, Week by Week
