This seminar surveys the core traditions of critical urban social science of the last half-century, and their major contributions to theory development and concrete research on contemporary global urbanization.  We focus in particular on approaches to urban studies that explore capitalist forms of urbanization, their expressions in historical regimes of urban development, their implications for sociospatial configurations within and beyond metropolitan regions, their mediations through state institutions and sociopolitical contestation, and their connections to the remaking of nonhuman landscapes and ecologies on a planetary scale.  The course will devote particular attention to research traditions that investigate processes of urban restructuring in relation to a range of contemporary global transformations—including geoeconomic restructuring; neoliberalization and the remaking of state power; the consolidation of new forms of sociospatial division and uneven development (including specific patterns of class, gender and racial polarization); financialization and cascading global financial crises; the consolidation of global supply chains and new patterns of industrial development in the global South; the proliferation of planetary ecological crises under the “Capitalocene”; and the explosion of new forms of urban insurgency against neoliberal austerity, racial injustice and ecological self-destruction.

This reading-intensive seminar is intended to introduce Ph.D. students and other aspiring urbanists to the foundations of critical urban studies and to provide a broad survey of major themes, methods and debates in this dynamic, interdisciplinary and global research field.  This is a “foundations” course oriented towards doctoral students and others interested in undertaking advanced scholarship in the field of critical urban studies, in relation to a broad range of sites and scales of investigation.  The seminar is a strongly recommended prerequisite for those interested in taking more specialized urban courses, in contributing to the future work of the Urban Theory Lab-Chicago and/or in developing original research projects in the field of critical urban studies.  Ph.D. students who might be interested in working with the instructor on a future exam or thesis are especially encouraged to take this course.  If space is available, non-doctoral students may be admitted to the course with the instructor’s permission.  Please attend the first class for details.