Anthropology 312 - The Urban Environment

Today, amid what has been dubbed the “urban millennium,” the unprecedented scale and speed of urbanization has generated radically new experiences, imaginaries, and relationships to urban environments. From post-industrial landscapes to concrete jungles where niches of beetles, racoons, and hawks thrive, the natural world is being critically remade by contemporary urbanism. In the process, however, new hybrid natures are also shaping humans and their environments in important ways. Radioactivity, air pollution, and a destabilized climate all put new pressures on urban infrastructures and city residents, presenting new challenges for urban planning and design. Drawing on urban studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, and political ecology, this course explores how our inherited categories of nature/culture, city/countryside, and urban/ecology are being transformed and redefined in and through the modern city. Engaging a range of theoretical texts, ethnographic accounts, and current case studies, we examine the nature of the “urban” and urban nature in explorations of environmental perception and problem definition in urban contexts; urban assemblages of human and non-human actors; as well as how the transformation of the urban environment is bound up in broader processes of uneven development. 

Limited to 21 students. Spring semester. Professor Nguyen. 

How to handle overenrollment: Priority given to ANTH and SOCI majors

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: emphasis on discussions, written work, oral presentations, and group work.