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.
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?
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:
Now, spend eight minutes and fifty-three seconds to view the video below.
Now spend ten minutes reading and reflecting on this:
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:
Discussion 7, week of October 22. Class and the City.
Our urbanizing world is also a world of stark inequality. More than a billion people live in slums and squatter settlements in poor countries. By one measure, the total wealth of the world economy has expanded by a factor of 10.1 over the past half-millennium (from 1500 to 1998). But some places have grown much faster than others: for Western Europe, the expansion was a factor of 23.2; for the "Western offshoots" of the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the growth was a factor of 65.4, and for Japan it was 40.8. But the ratios are lower for Asia excluding Japan (5.1), Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (9.0), and Africa (3.4). Much of this inequality reflects the history of urbanization and industrialized economic development. A measure of inter-regional wealth disparities comparing different parts of the world widened from 15:1 in 1950 to 19:1 by the end of the century. (Data Sources: Angus Maddison's data, via World Bank (2009). Reshaping Economic Geography: World Development Report. Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, p. 109.)
Inequality has also increased dramatically within many of the world's wealthiest countries, and within the wealthiest cities of those wealthy countries. Canada is no exception: note the dramatic increase in the share of national income taken by the top one percent, and the top one hundredth of one percent, since the early 1980s (see the graphs below). We are also seeing a pronounced spatial polarization of income and wealth inside Canada's largest cities. David Hulchanski, a Professor at the University of Toronto, has analyzed how Toronto has become "Three Cities" -- a city of expanding wealth and opportunity, a shrinking city of middle-class stability, and an expanding city where incomes are falling farther behind (see the map below). David Ley and Nicholas Lynch have undertaken a similar analysis focusing on Vancouver.
For discussion this week, you should read through the short Ley-Lynch article, and then skim through the lecture notes on "Class and the City." Then come to discussion prepared to discuss three important questions:
1. What do the trends on inequality mean for class relations in an urbanizing world?
2. What examples have you seen -- in this city, or any other city you know -- that illustrate relations of social class?
3. From what you have experienced and/or what you have read, are relations of social class getting "better" or "worse"?