The second semester in this year-long interdisciplinary Core Seminar serves as a point of departure for future Urban Studies Labs at the Graduate Center. The Urban Studies Labs, supported in 2019-2020 by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, seek to nurture a culture of stewardship, exchange, and support among doctoral students who have made urban studies the focus of their doctoral research.
The Core Seminar introduces participating doctoral students in the humanities, social sciences, and urban-oriented sciences to the theoretical perspectives and methodological skills that will enable them to undertake collaborative research on a case study in New York City as well as to pursue their own doctoral research. The second semester focuses on the many methodologies that urban studies researchers use, connects seminar participants with actors who influence outcomes in the case study area, and engages students in using these methods to produce a collective project on the case study. This will also help students advance their own public-facing research, engage specific local issues, and participate in critical debates about the urban landscape. In addition to invited experts, seminar participants will receive support from the five doctoral students who received inaugural Urban Studies fellowships.
During spring 2019, the first semester of the Core Seminar focused on the forces acting on Long Island City, Queens, in the wake of the withdrawal of the proposal for Amazon HQ2. This fall, we shift our attention to the Gowanus Canal area in Brooklyn, which is undergoing rezoning and exemplifies the conflicting forces and competing ideas about future developments in formerly industrial, waterside neighborhoods (of which New York City and comparable places elsewhere in the world have many). Contestation around this site poses the question “Redevelopment for whom and to what ends?”
During fall 2019, students will treat this neighborhood as an ecology of work, consumption, recreation, residence, and community-making and ask how these elements both frame and reflect politics, policy-making, everyday life, and the inherited built environment. We will ask how local communities have formed and how people are developing a sense of belonging in light of rapid local change and profound national and transnational transformations.
The seminar session will expose participants to archival research, visual and auditory inventories, fieldwork, in-depth interviewing, survey research, Census data analysis, administrative data analysis, and geographic information system mapping (GIS) to explore urgent questions about land use, zoning, gentrification, climate change, industrial ecologies, neighborhood cohesion, recreation, and other pressing topics. Many sessions will include input from outside experts in the particular methodology. (Many of the experts listed in the syllabus are still tentative and subject to change.)
Friday afternoon field trips will be scheduled periodically during the semester, starting with a site visit on Friday, September 6.
Contact and office hours:
Professor Gutman:
212-650-8749; mgutman@ccny.cuny.edu
GC/CUNY: Wednesday, 2:30-4:00 pm, room 4214.10
SSA/CCNY: Thursday, 10:00-12:00, room 2M06
Professor Mollenkopf:
212-817-2046; JMollenkopf@gc.cuny.edu
GC: Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, room 6202.03
