Americans have long had a love-hate relationship with their cities. Popular images of New York and Los Angeles oscillate between glittering pictures of wealth and culture to grim scenes of excess and violence, often teetering at the edge of disaster. Already at the dawn of the industrial age in the early 19th century, the grandiose plans for a new capital city on the Potomac were steadily undermined by the anti-urban visions of a Jeffersonian pastoralism. The rise of great industrial metropolises in the latter part of the 19th century was watched with a mixture of fascination and horror. On the one side lay the belief that the city represented the crystallization of social and technological progress. On the other side lay the fear that the city had become a monster. It was common to think of the industrial metropolis as a force of destructive nature, or else as an alien life form that had somehow escaped rational human control. In the twentieth century there were renewed attempts to rationalize the industrial city through planning and redevelopment, as though the city could become a benign machine. Almost as quickly, however, the new metaphors slipped into dystopian scenes. In the late 20th century the apocalyptic visions of decayed, bunt out cities became sources, both of horror and aesthetic delight.

This course will investigate the ambivalent images and metaphors that surrounded American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will particularly examine architectural images and attempts to control the physical environment of the city. The sources will combine various types of historical documents, including: literary works (Theodore Dreiser and Henry James); sociological and historical accounts (Lewis Mumford and Louis Wirth); architectural and urbanistic writings (Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch); paintings and architectural designs (Thomas Cole and Daniel Burnham); and cinematic representations (Blade Runner and Dark City).