This course provides a broad, deep, multidisciplinary introduction to the study of urbanization in the social sciences. The modern capitalist city is by its very nature a multifaceted, politically contested, dynamically changing terrain. To examine the multiple contours and contradictions of modern urban life, the course surveys a broad range of research traditions from across the social sciences, as well as the work of environmental scientists, urban planners and architects. We are interested not only in the material, political-economic, spatial, and infrastructural dimensions of urbanization, but in the construction, contestation, and evolution of knowledge-formations that seek to decipher the rapidly changing, polarized geographies of urban life in the modern world, and the prospects for more socially just, democratic, and environmentally viable cities and forms of urbanization.

To this end, first, we survey various conceptualizations of the city and the urban in the modern world, and we consider how the latter articulate to specific methodological approaches to the study of urban processes, transformations and struggles. Second, we explore the question of how social power is materialized and contested in the spaces of urbanization (through the materialization of class exploitation, gendered hierarchization, racial domination, sexual normalization, and oppressive/’othering’ systems of peoplehood in and beyond the city). Following a general consideration of the historical geographies and cyclical rhythms of urbanization under capitalism, the final part of the course investigates several key dimensions of urban restructuring during the last half-century. Key topics include, among others, geoeconomic restructuring and urban crisis; the transformation of urban form; territorial stigmatization and “hyperghettoization”; gentrification and the housing question; the neoliberalization of urban governance; the rise of “platform” urbanism; cities and environmental crises; and struggles over the right to the city.

One of the major agendas of the course is to interrogate critically the various frameworks of conceptualization that have been used to frame, focus, and animate urban research and their implications for our evolving understanding of various essential dimensions of cities and urbanization in the modern world. This is an essential basis on which to develop more intellectually adequate, socially relevant, and imaginative approaches to understanding—and shaping—our urbanized planet, its contradictions, its crises, and its potential futures.