Thinking New York: The Urban Conceptions

“New York is the perfect model of a city,” stated Lewis Mumford, “not the model of a perfect city.” This seminar contrasts the ideas of four urban thinkers and actors who possessed radically different perspectives on the modern metropolis and brought them to bear in and on New York City. The protagonists are Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), and Rem Koolhaas (1944–). We discuss the urban and architectural issues that animated them—and frequently pitted them against each other—as they variously strove to imagine and affect New York’s built future. From Mumford’s prophetic environmentalism and “sidewalk criticism” to Moses’s “expressway world,” from Jacobs’s neighborhood activism and battles against urban renewal to Koolhaas’s celebration of Manhattan’s “delirious” architectural imaginary, the course reassesses the legacies of these figures, placing them into historical context and exploring the changing social, political, and cultural forces and landscapes that shaped their thinking. What “usable past,” to invoke Mumford again, do they offer to urbanism today? Concerned with both realities on the ground and big ideas about how to build and inhabit cities, class discussions revolve around key texts supplemented by slide lectures, film excerpts, and case-study presentations. Students are expected to make site visits and to carry out primary research utilizing archival and material resources available around New York City.