Syllabus

You can download a copy of the syllabus here.

The Digital Image of the City

INTD 2430

Course hours: M/W 1:00 – 2:25 p.m.                                                                                  Professor Jen Jack Gieseking
Course room:             VAC 305                                                                                                   [email protected]
Office hours: Wednesday 2:30 – 4 p.m. & by appt.                                                     Office: VAC 308

Description

As over half the world’s population now dwells in cities, revolutionary advances in technology such as big data have caused policymakers and activists alike to shift their focus toward a movement of smart urbanism. Smart urbanism includes interventions in urban issues through better uses of technology and data, from gentrification to pollution, access to public spaces to improved walkability. How do these changes support or inhibit the growth of equal and just cities? And how can we use data and data visualizations to represent the multiple experiences of the city to affect public policy for the common good?

Through individual and group field research, techniques of social and spatial analysis, and close readings of classic and cutting-edge readings about cities, students will gain a general introduction to urban studies. Students will develop ways to speak about and to urban public policy through data visualizations, including geographic information systems (GIS), mental maps, participant observations, and transect walks. This interdisciplinary course focuses on modern cities in the US, namely New York City and Portland, Maine, to connect global urban issues to the intimate experiences of everyday life.

Assignments & Learning Goals

You will learn the process of social science research by collecting your own data about the city in two or three site visits to Portland, Maine, and then making, procuring, and analyzing datasets relevant to your research topic via GIS. Your arguments will develop both on your own and with your research topic working group. The three research topics for this year’s class are infrastructure, housing, and public space. This project will allow you to develop your verbal, spatial, and critical thinking skills by reviewing city policies and issues through the lens of your qualitative and quantitative data, as well as through core and cutting-edge readings on urbanization and smart cities. You will develop a robust understanding of how data visualizations and analysis can support the future of smart urbanism for the common good.

This process affords you room to set the criteria for, build, and then evaluate your own project’s impact. The data collection and analysis, in-class working groups, and writing assignments will prepare you for the capstones of the course: a working group presentation on your shared research topic and an independent research paper. Throughout the semester, blog posts and comments will allow you to refine yours writing skills to reflect on the ideas you are developing via your research. Note: All blogs posts are due by 5 p.m. the day before class. Details of assignments, blog posts, and comment topics will be clarified in advance during class.

Website, Readings, and Recommended Texts

Most of which can be found on e-reserve and the remainder can be found in the campus bookstore. The recommend texts listed here are NOT required but will be read heavily and you may wish to own them as they are core texts in the field. Our readings may change based on the course of our conversations and you will be notified in advance if changes take place.

Course website: http://bit.ly/bowdoin-diotc

Course ereserves: http://ereserves.bowdoin.edu/

Required texts:

  • Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Against the Smart City. 1.3 edition. Do projects. [Kindle for ebook or Lulu.com for print]
  • Gieseking, Jen Jack, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert, eds. 2014. The People, Place and Space Reader. New York: Routledge.

Recommended texts:

  • LeGates, Richard T., and Frederic Stout, eds. 2011. The City Reader. 5th edition. New York: Routledge.
  • Mikoleit, Anne. 2011. Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Evaluation Criteria

Group Field Trip Participation              5%
Blog Posts & Comments                           30%
Hackathon or TechMeetup                     5%
Proposed Paper Topic & Abstract       10%
Final Presentations                                      15%
Group Evaluation                                          10%
Final Paper                                                         25%

Collaboration

All write-ups, reviews, documentation and other written material must be original and may not be derived from other sources. However, we have a relaxed collaboration policy for this course in that you will be developing your ideas with your research working groups. As such you should always be clear on what part of the work you hand in is your own, what parts come from other sources, and what parts are collaborative. Generally if you are exchanging information through a written, video, or visual medium then it rises to the level of something that you should report when you hand in your assignment; this may be most easily seen to when citing your peers’ blog work in your final paper when appropriate. You will not be penalized for collaboration; it is just important for us to get a better sense of what you and your fellow students know. Failure to cite work that you draw from other sources is a violation of Bowdoin’s Academic Honor Code.

Software for the Course

QGIS, TileMill, and Mapboc are free, open source, desktop-based GIS software programs. QGIS is a robust F/OSS program with strong analytic functionality, while TileMill allows for more refined design and full web integration when uploading files to Mapbox.

Class Breakdown

I. Cities Are…

1. Monday, September 8th: An Introduction to the Digital Image of the City

2. Wednesday, September 10th :: Producing Cities for the Common Good

Hayden, Dolores. 1997. “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and Politics of Space.” In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, 14–43. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia [Anthony Townsend]. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1evCV6_e8Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player. [First 43 minutes, online.]

3. Saturday, Saturday 13th :: FIELD TRIP

Debord, Guy. 2014 [1958]. “Theory of the Dérive and Definitions.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 65-69. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Bauman, John F. 2006. “A Saga of Renewal in a Maine City: Exploring the Fate of Portland’s Bayside District.” Journal of Planning History 5 (4): 329–54.

Assignment due: Blog post #1

4. Monday, September 15th :: Thinking about Smart Urbanism, Then & Now

Lynch, Kevin. 1960a. “Preface,” “The Image of the Environment,” “Three Cities,” “The City Image and Its Elements,” “A New Scale,” and “Appendix B.” In The Image of the City, v-vi, 1-13, 14-45, 46-90, 118–20. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

5. Wednesday, September 17th: Qualitative Social Science Research Methods

Milgram, Stanley, and Denise Jodelet. 1976. “Psychological Maps of Paris.” In Environmental Psychology, edited by H. Proshansky, W.H. Ittleson, and L. Rivlin, 104–24. New York: Holt.

Hiss, Tony. 1991. “Simultaneous Perception” in The Experience of Place. NY: Vintage, 3-26.

6. Monday, September 22nd: Power and Policies about Cities, Smart & Otherwise

Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Selections from Against the Smart City. 1.3 edition. Do projects.

Assignment due: Complete IRB certification and submit CITI certification to P.JJG via email (NOTE CHANGE)

 7. Wednesday, September 24th: How Modern Cities Happened

Berman, Marshall. 1988. “In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York.” In All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 287–348. New York: Penguin.

Angelidou, Margarita. 2014. “Smart City Policies: A Spatial Approach.” Cities. Accessed Aug. 16.

Assignment due: Blog post #2 (NOTE CHANGE)

II. Cities in Depth

8. Monday, September 29th :: Public Space

Low, Setha M. 2002. “Spaces of Reflection, Recovery, and Resistance: Reimagining the Postindustrial Plaza.” In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, 163–72. New York: Routledge.

Mitchell, Don. 2014 [2003]. “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 192-196. New York: Routledge, 2014.

9. Wednesday, October 1st :: Housing

Smith, Neil. 2014 [1996]. “‘Class Struggle on Avenue B’: The Lower East Side as the Wild Wild West.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 314-319. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Fields, Desiree, and Sabina Uffer. 2014. “The Financialisation of Rental Housing: A Comparative Analysis of New York City and Berlin.” Urban Studies, July.

Crowley, David N., Edward Curry, and John G. Breslin. 2014. “Leveraging Social Media and IoT to Bootstrap Smart Environments.” In Big Data and Internet of Things: A Roadmap for Smart Environments, edited by Nik Bessis and Ciprian Dobre, 379–99. Springer. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-05029-4_16.

Assignment due: Blog post #3 (NOTE CHANGE)

10. Monday, October 6th : Infrastructure

Sorkin, Michael. 2014 [1999]. “Traffic in Democracy.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 411-415. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Simone, AbdulMaliq. 2014 [2004]. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 241–46. New York: Routledge.

Jiménez, Alberto Corsín. 2014. “The Right to Infrastructure: a Prototype for Open Source Urbanism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 342–62.

Assignment due: Blog post #4 (NOTE CHANGE)

11. Wednesday, October 8th : Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration

Cahill, Caitlin. 2006. “‘At Risk’? The Fed Up Honeys Re-Present the Gentrification of the Lower East Side.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly — The Global and the Intimate 34 (1/2): 334–63.

Fine, Michelle, and Selcuk R. Sirin. 2007. Selections from “Theorizing Hyphenated Selves: Researching Youth Development in and Across Contentious Political Contexts.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 366-371. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Graham, Mark, Matthew Zook, and Andrew Boulton. 2013. “Augmented Reality in Urban Places: Contested Content and the Duplicity of Code.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (3): 464–79.

Assignment due: Blog post #5 (NOTE CHANGE)

12. Wednesday, October 13th : NO CLASS – HAPPY LEAF PEEPING

13. Monday, October 15th : Sustainability

Sorkin, Michael. 2002. “The Center Cannot Hold.” In After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, 197–207. New York: Routledge.

Steneck, R. S., T. P. Hughes, J. E. Cinner, W. N. Adger, S. N. Arnold, et al. 2011. “Creation of a Gilded Trap by the High Economic Value of the Maine Lobster Fishery.” Conservation Biology: Journal of Society for Conservation Biology 25 (5): 904–12.

Gabrys, Jennifer. 2014. “Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (1): 30–48.

Assignment due: Blog post #6

III. Mapping the City

14. Monday, October 20th : On Community & Cool

NOTE: Class meets in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Study Room.

Young, Iris Marion. 2014 [1990]. “City Life & Difference.” In The People, Place and Space Reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, et al, 223-226. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Zukin, Sharon. 2011. “How Brooklyn Became Cool.” In Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, 35–62. New York: Oxford University Press.

15. Wednesday, October 22nd : GIS Lab – QGIS Interface

Longley, Paul A., et al. 2010b. “Representing Geography.” In Geographic Information Systems and Science, 75–98. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Wilson, Matthew W. 2014. “On the Criticality of Mapping Practices: Geodesign as Critical GIS?” Landscape and Urban Planning. Accessed August 31.

Donnelly, Frank. 2013a. “An Overview of GIS.” In Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, 1–10. Baruch College, New York, NY. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/.

In-class:

Donnelly, Frank. 2013b. “Exploring the Interface.” In Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, 11–25. Baruch College, New York, NY. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/.

16. Monday, October 27th : GIS Lab – Geographic Analysis I

Longley, Paul A., et al. 2010d. “Georeferencing.” In Geographic Information Systems and Science, 123–46. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

In-class:

Donnelly, Frank. 2013c. “Geographic Analysis.” In Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, 26–53. Baruch College, New York, NY. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/.

Assignment due: Blog post #6 & #7 – can be turned in any time until this point

17. Wednesday, October 29th : GIS Lab – Geographic Analysis II

In-class:

Donnelly, Frank. 2013c. “Geographic Analysis.” In Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, 26–53. Baruch College, New York, NY. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/.

Assignment due: Comment #2 and #3 on blog post #6 and #7

18. Monday, November 3rd : GIS Lab – Thematic Mapping

Longley, Paul A., et al. 2010e. “Representing Geography.” In Geographic Information Systems and Science, 75–98. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

In-class:

Donnelly, Frank. 2013d. “Thematic Mapping.” In Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, 54–86. Baruch College, New York, NY. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/.

19. Wednesday, November 5th : GIS Lab – Creating & Finding Your Own Datasets I

In-class research working group collaboration and visit from librarian.

In-class reference:

Donnelly, Frank. 2013e. “Going Further.” In Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, 87–93. Baruch College, New York, NY. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/.

Assignment due: Blog post #8

20. Monday, November 10th : GIS Lab – Creating & Finding Your Own Datasets II

IV. Reading & Writing the City

21. Wednesday, November 12th : “Big” Data & the City

Wilson, Matthew W. 2011. “Data Matter(s): Legitimacy, Coding, and Qualifications-of-life.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (5): 857–72.

NYC Digital: NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. 2011. Road Map for the Digital City: Achieving New York City’s Digital Future. Report. New York: The City of New York. http://www.nyc.gov/html/digital/downloads/pdf/90dayreport.pdf.

Assignment due: Proposed paper topic & abstract

22. Monday, November 17th : A Case of GIS at Work – The Queer(ish) City

Gieseking, Jen Jack. 2014. “On the Closing of the Last Lesbian Bar in San Francisco: What the Demise of the Lex Tells Us About Gentrification | Jen Jack Gieseking.” Huffingto Post. October 28. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jen-jack-gieseking/on-the-closing-of-the-las_b_6057122.html.

Muller Myrdahl, Tiffany. 2011. “Queerying Creative Cities.” In Queerying Planning, edited by Petra L. Doan, 157–68. London: Ashgate.

23. Wednesday, November 19th : Social Science Research Analytics

Dennis Jr., Samuel F. 2006. “Prospects for Qualitative GIS at the Intersection of Youth Development & Participatory Urban Planning.” Environment and Planning A 38: 2039–54.

Monmonier, Mark. 1996. “Elements of the Map,” “Map Generalization: Little White Lies and Lots of Them,” “Blunders That Mislead,” “Maps for Political Propaganda.” In How to Lie with Maps, 5–24, 25–42, 43–57, 87–112. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

x. Monday, November 24th

NO CLASS – Professor Gieseking will be attending a conference.

Assignment due: Blog post #9

24. Monday, December 1st : Interactive GIS for the Web – TileMill & Mapbox

Reading / Assignment Due: Complete TileMill/Mapbox “Crashcourse.”

25. Wednesday, December 3rd : Research Groups: Analyzing Your Own Data & Maps I

In-class research working group time.

26. Monday, December 8th : Research Groups: Analyzing Your Own Data & Maps II

In-class research working group time.

27. Wednesday, December 10th :

Assignment Due: Research working group presentations.

28. Wednesday, December 17th :

Assignment Due: Individual papers due to Professor Gieseking over email.

 

*FIN*