ARCH 603, Section 2

This seminar assays a critical history of architectural and urban difference, seeking out the history of difference as an object of architectural and urban knowledge and action. Focusing on the global history of slums, blight, and ghettos, we will approach difference as a condition that is both discursively and materially distributed across buildings and cities a spatialization of risk, threat, and danger that leads the state, business interests, social reformers, and their architectural and urban planning emissaries to intervene in, transform, and sometimes destroy the spaces and lives of marginalized urban communities, and reciprocally leads those communities to define and organize themselves and their world.