From Wuhan to New York, cities have been at the epicenter of the global Coronavirus pandemic. The spread of the disease, not speak of the broader social and economic fallout, has brought into sharp relief challenges that have been a perennial concern to students of urban life.
Drawing on the various theoretical approaches and substantive analysis contained in the materials we’ve discussed this semester, please prepare a 4-page essay (1,600 words) which relates the problems we’re now encountering to the topics addressed in these works.
Among the issues that might be addressed are the following:
- What are some of the defining characteristics of the city, and how do they relate to the uneven spread of the Coronavirus across the nation, if not the globe? What geographic regions have shown high rates of infection, which ones lower rates, and how have these uneven rates been influenced by historical patterns of urbanization. (Week 4: “Urbanism as a Way of Life”; “City as Social Laboratory”; “The Growth of the City”)
- How has the health crisis unleashed by the Coronavirus pandemic put into questions notions of the function and organization of the city? How might the sudden shift to the use of digital technologies transform the dynamics of our big cities going forward (Week 5: “Introduction,” Neighborhood; “Gemeinschaft Revisited: A Critique and Reconstruction of the Community Concept”)
- How have recent transformations in our nation’s approach to governance, along with our ideas about public welfare and which sectors of society ought to be responsible for addressing it, contributed to the magnitude of the crisis? Does the severity of the economic crisis that looms over the horizon require that we rethink and reformulate this approach to governance (Week 6: “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism”; “Bankrupted Detroit”
- How are strategies of urban development which became popular in the postwar period likely to impact the pace of economic recovery and our ability to restore the economy to previous levels of employment? (Week 7–“In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York”; “The Politics of Bread and Circuses: Building the City for the Visitor Class”; Week 9–“Return of the Sweatshop”; “When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor”)
- How is the history of racial and ethnic segregation in the U.S. related to the emergence of specific hotspots and the stark disparities in the rates of infection and morbidity that we see among major racial and ethnic groups? (Week 8–“American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass”; Latinos, Residential Segregation and Spatial Assimilation in Micropolitan Areas”)
- How has the outlook of urbanites shaped the popular response to the crisis? How is the “mental life” of residents in the metropolitan centers related to popular reactions to the emergency measures states have sought to institute, which have seen residents of big cities engage in nightly rituals of solidarity, while more suburban and rural residents have supported defiance of such orders, and organized political protests against them? (Week 3–“The Metropolis and Mental Life”)