Sociology
10 C. Chase-Dunn
TuThurs
12:10-1:30 University
Village Theatre 10
The City
W. O. J. Niewencamp, “The
mill at Bruges.” P. 77 in The Modern
Woodcut by Herbert Furst, London: The Bodley Head.
v. 8-2-04
Course Web Site is at: http://iLearn.ucr.edu/ A student's username
is the same as the student's user account on the server student.ucr.edu. The
student's password is his or her 9 digit social security number with no dashes
or spaces.
This is a course on the emergence and transformation of human settlement systems. Settlement systems are networks of interacting settlements. We will examine the origins of sedentism, as well the growth of hamlets, villages, towns, cities and the globalized gigalopoli of today. We will study the forces that have led humans to live in larger and larger urban agglomerations and the problems of sustainability that contemporary urban growth processes are creating. Topics that will be covered are: problems associated with the estimation of the population sizes of modern and premodern settlements; settlement size distributions; high density and low density settlements; the relationship between empires and cities; the process of urbanization by which the proportion of the total population if a society living in cities goes up; world cities and global cities; the whole global system of settlements, the Southern California urban agglomeration; and the problems associated with the pattern of low-density urban growth (urban sprawl) that are so apparent in Southern California. We will also study industrial urbanization, megacities and the urbanization of the global system with its world cities tightly linked by communications, transportation, trade and organization. Contemporary urban issues in Southern California and other regions will also be considered.
The
course will employ the comparative world-systems perspective to examine urban
problems since the emergence of sedentism. A primer on the modern world-systems
perspective is Thomas Richard Shannon’s An Introduction to the World-Systems
Perspective (Westview 1996).
Readings marked with an asterisk (*) are required. Others are recommended.
Grading is based on the midterm exam (30%)
[November 4], the final (30%), [December 10] attendance (15%), and a short
(less than 15 pp. typed, double-spaced) research paper
that comparatively analyses the settlement system of a modern country or a
whole world-system (25%) [due date December 2]. The midterm and the final will
be in-class essay exams.
The following books are available at the University Book Store and are on reserve:
Mike Davis, City of Quartz
Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics
Available at the University Photocopy Service is a
reader for the course entitled Cities
Reader.
September 23 Overview of
“the city”
September 28 The
comparative world-systems perspective
*Chase-Dunn and Hall,
“Global Social Change in the Long Run” http://www.irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/10/socchange.htm
September 30 Settlement
Systems 1
*Christopher Chase-Dunn
and Andrew Jorgenson, “Settlement systems: past and present” in Cities
Reader.
*Christopher Chase-Dunn
“The changing role of cities in world-systems” in Cities
Reader.
*Christopher
Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall “City and empire growth/decline sequences in
ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian world-systems” in Cities
Reader.
Jill
E. Neitzel (ed.) Great Towns and Regional Polities in the Prehistoric
Americaqn Southwest and Southeast. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Marc
Van De Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City (Oxford 1997)
*Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexis
Alvarez and Daniel Pasciuti, “Power and size: urbanization and empire formation
in world-systems” in Cities
Reader.
October 21 Cities.
Empires and Hegemony2
*Christopher Chase-Dunn
and Alice Willard, “Cities in the Central Political/Military Network Since CE 1200: Size
Hierarchy and Domination” in Cities
Reader.
Charles
Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European states, AD 990-1990
(Blackwell, 1990)
*Christopher Chase-Dunn
and E. Susan Manning, “City systems and world-systems: four millennia of city
growth and decline’ in Cities
Reader.
Janet
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (Oxford 1989)
October 28 The
urbanization of societies and world urbanization (midterm
study questions handed out) (Topic for research paper is
due)
Abel
Wolman, “The metabolism of cities.” Science 1965
William
Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
*Christopher Chase-Dunn,
“The coming of urban primacy in Latin America” in Cities Reader.
David A. Smith, Third
World Cities in Global Perspective (Westview 1996)
Hugh H. Schwartz, Urban
Renewal, Municipal Revitalization: The Case of Curitiba, Brazil
November 11 Global cities and globalization
Saskia Sassen, The Global
City: New York, London, Tokyo.
Peter Taylor, The
World City Network.
Mark Abrahamson, Global
Cities
Allen J. Scott and Edward Soja, The City: Los Angeles and Urban
Theory
Low density and multicentric cities
Mixed Use Developments
November 25 no class
December 2 Lyrical upsurge. Paper is due (study questions for final handed out)
December 10 (Friday), 9:00
am-11:00 am: Final Exam