ARCH 509, Section 7

The “social life” produced by and of urbanism has long been a subject of study by social scientists, philosophers, and others seeking to understand the distinct ways in which individuals form community, divide or share resources, and build institutions ,infrastructures, and domestic spaces in support of urban life . As such, “sociality”—the desire to come together in association with others—is a necessary project of the architect and urban designer. While urban scholars of the turn of the twentieth century such as Lewis Wirth and others of the “Chicago School” of Sociology focused on the ways in which the urbanization produced by industrialization had broken‘…bonds of kinship, of neighborliness, and sentiment’(to paraphrase),sociologists and others who followed such as Richard Sennett and Iris Marion Young celebrated the ways in which urban residents, initially “strangers” to one another organized to form communities not tied to family ,religion, race ,or ethnicity. In the twenty-first century, as the social spaces of the city have become fodder for neoliberal accumulation and consumption, design theorists and activists, from feminists of the 1980s such as Dolores Hayden to architects such as Andrés Jaque, have begun to develop new new architectures and urbanisms built on principles of social relationships that challenge capitalism and/or propose new ways to come together in urban space