HSOC-274: Planetary Urbanization

This course asks us to imagine the continuous monument of industrial urbanisation that sprawls across the surface of the Earth from the Port of Los Angeles to the Pearl River Delta as a condition of "planetary urbanization" - a monument not of pyramids, but of terraforming, computation, and circulation. It is not just that half the world's population lives in cities today, but that the material traces, logics, and infrastructures of the city can now be understood to operate at a planetary-scale, extending its reach under oceans and across continents, into the atmosphere and into our devices. Planetary Urbanization is also fundamentally a point of view: a "hyper-object" a "stack" seen in fragments through data visualization or in Google Earth - a new cosmological vision of the human habitat. However, this vision has consequences, and the shift to planetary scale and an urbanism with no outside may force us to rethink our models of nature, environment, and the human. This course will bring together a range of texts from urban sociology, architectural history, geography, critical theory and philosophy to extend our spatial and temporal considerations of the city, to rethink our ecological orientations, and to speculate on what new territories and new forms the urban future might produce.