Lecture Notes

Below is a table listing the lectures given in this course. Excluding the introductory and concluding lecture, each of the linked pages includes a lecture summary for the class, pages from the class handout, referenced texts from the lecture, as well as a list of precedents, examples, and works discussed during the class. The introductory lecture provides a brief overview of the course, the covered topics, and the course structure. The concluding lecture is a review of the entire course, with emphasis on common themes and changes in theory of city form over time.

LEC # TOPICS
1 Introduction
Section One: The Nature of City Form Theory
2 Normative Theory I: The City as Supernatural
3 Normative Theory II: The City as Machine
4 Normative Theory III: The City as Organism
5 Descriptive and Functional Theory
6 Dimensions, Patterns, Agreements, Structure, and Syntax
Section Two: The Form of the Modern City
7 The Early Cities of Capitalism
8 Transformations I: London
9 Transformations II: Paris
10 Transformations III: Vienna and Barcelona
11 Transformations IV: Chicago
12 Transformations V: Panopticism, St. Petersburg and Berlin
13 Utopianism as Social Reform and Built Form
14 20th Century Realizations: Russian and Great Britain
Section Three: Current Theory and Practice
15 City Form and Process
16 Spatial & Social Structure I: Theory
17 Spatial & Social Structure II: Bipolarity
18 Spatial & Social Structure III: Colony & Post-colony
19 Form Models I: Modern and Post-modern Urbanism
20 Form Models II: Open-endedness and Prophecy
21 Form Models III and IV: Rationality and Memory
22 Cases I: Public and Private Domains
23 Cases II: Suburbs and Periphery
24 Cases III: Post-urbanism and Resource Conservation
25 Cases IV: Hyper and Mega-urbanism
26 Conclusion: Towards a Theory of City Form