Capitalist urbanization is a world-transforming process, at once intensely creative and brutally destructive, of both human and non-human life.  It involves the building and constant restructuring of cities as well as the transformation of regions, territories and environments that support city-making processes, from the local and the national to the continental and the planetary scales.

To what degree, and in what ways, has this process been reflexively shaped through “planning”?  What does it mean to “plan” urban life and urban development in a social formation in which material wealth (use values) are produced through a profit-driven process of capital accumulation?  In what ways are the built environments of modern capitalism shaped through earlier rounds of planning—their “successes” as well as their unintended consequences and failures?  How is the project of planning intertwined with power, inequality, exclusion, expropriation and dispossession?  How has planning evolved since its institutionalization by Euro-American imperial powers during the last quarter of the 19^th century?  How should we understand the legacies of “modernist” urban planning, whether in relation to the crises of 20^th century capitalism or—perhaps more urgently—the exploding social, political and environmental emergencies of the early 21^st century world?  What is the role of urban planning in shaping collective planetary futures?  Can the future of urbanization be planned, and if so, by whom, through what means, and towards what ends?

This course seeks to engage these questions through the tools of critical urban theory and critical urban social science.  Building upon an interdisciplinary literature drawn from urban sociology, planning theory and history as well as urban social science, architecture and design studies and critical environmental studies, we will explore the emergence, development and continual transformation of urban planning in relation to changing configurations of capitalist urbanization, modern state power, sociopolitical insurgency and environmental crisis.  Following an initial exploration of divergent conceptualizations of “planning,” the “city” and “urbanization,” we investigate (a) the changing sites and targets of planning intervention; (b) the evolution of political and institutional struggles regarding the instruments, goals and constituencies of planning; (c) the contradictory connections between planning and diverse configurations of inequality, power and domination in modern society (including class, race, gender and sexuality); and (d) the question of whether and how planning strategies might help produce alternative (more socially just and environmentally sane) forms of urbanization in the future.

Part One surveys several key theoretical, social-scientific and normative perspectives on the nature of planning in modern capitalist social formations.  Key questions include:  What is planning, and how, when, where and why does it emerge?  How are planning practices and visions linked to broader structures of political-economic life, including formations of social power, domination and ideology?  How are the sites and targets of planning constructed, and how do they change across time and space?  How does planning construct, regulate and transform the web of nonhuman life and planetary ecologies?  Do planners serve private, particularistic interests or the public good?  How should we approach the histories and geographies of planning under modern capitalism?  How are cycles of planning intervention linked to processes of capitalist industrialization, urbanization, formations of state power, patterns of environmental transformation and waves of sociopolitical insurgency?

Part Two explores some of the key episodes, movements and approaches in the history of modern urban planning since the 1850s.  Although we focus in some detail on certain influential ideas, visions and practices of major urban, regional and territorial planners, we embed their activities within the historically and geographically specific constraints, opportunities, contradictions and struggles associated with each of the major phases of modern capitalist urbanization and associated formations of national state power, regulatory capacity, ecological transformation and political contestation.  We explore the conflictual interaction of capitalist firms/corporations, property developers (rentiers), political institutions and social movements at various spatial scales, and the consequences of that interaction for the institutional, legal, spatial and ideological terrains of planning, and for the broader geographies and ecologies of urbanization.  Here we also attend to the question of “roads not taken” during the history of urban and territorial planning in the US and beyond—suppressed possibilities for constructing what we might think of as “alter-urbanizations,” other ways of organizing, producing and transforming the urban fabric of collective life.

The course is, at core, a reflection on and critique of what we might term “urban strategies”—efforts by states, capitalists, communities and social movements to shape and reshape the urbanizing worlds in which we live together.  We will critically interrogate some of the dominant intellectual and ideological paradigms through which planners have mobilized urban strategies in the modern world and their contradictory consequences for social life, spatial arrangements and environmental conditions, within and beyond the sites to which they have been directed.  The course is intended, above all else, to enhance students’ capacity to interrogate critically the major frameworks that are currently being used to shape planetary urban and territorial futures.  This critical reflexivity is understood here as an essential precondition and orientation for any adequate form of urban praxis that might facilitate more socially just, democratic, and ecologically sane forms of urban life.