It is a great honor to be entrusted with the responsibility of teaching 300+ undergraduate students this semester across two courses/departments at the University of Calgary -- one for geography on the evolution of cities through our past and the other for planning on building better cities for our future. This post will be short as I am quite busy every day prepping and refining my course content and delivery, in addition to writing papers.
It's hard to believe that we are only two weeks in. So much has happened. From the first small self-contained cities of five thousand years ago to the massive mechanized cities and sprawling suburbs that are our reality today--we experienced through reading the vicissitudes in the delicate balance between peoples and resources as well as the dramatic rise and fall of urbanized empires, which are really the cumulative result of daily mismanagement that went unnoticed or neglected. (I often stress, nothing big just happens without a bunch of small things adding up.) We witnessed how external fixes to resource crises--that is, attempting to repair the balance through expansion and acquisition of new resources, often involving dispossession of the more defenseless--tend to be unsustainable. We explored better solutions by unpacking the sociospatial configuration of cities.
While it's great fun getting lost in the fascinating details of the past urban forms and functions--pockets of civilization in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Indus Valley, Egypt, and Northern China, Greek city-states, Roman empire's defensive outposts, Medieval hubs, mercantilist trading centers, burgeoning steam-powered metropolis, factory towns, planned suburbs, we also must ground ourselves in the continuities and generalizable characteristics of urbanism as well as disruptions in the form of new institutions (such as the private ownership of the means of production that gave rise to cottage industries). We also keep track of the theories that people all over have come up with to explain and understand urban phenomena--thus linking documented experience with epistemology.
Over on the planning side, similarly, we familiarized ourselves with the many plans of Calgary and its surrounding region (it's nice to see some degree of intermunicipal coordination), teasing out its various elements--visions and goals down to strategies and actions--and matching them to theoretical justifications and experimental results. Inspired by how the City Reader opens with the study of cities, I opened with the education of planners through accredited professional degrees and why certain coursework is required, so that we understand the problems, objectives, stakes, and planners' roles and powers. We examine not only theories in planning that inform our policy recommendations and theories of planning that guide implementation but also theories about planning that illuminate the paths and obstacles ahead. We look at the broader geopolitical and socioeconomic configurations that circumscribe the purview and possibility space for local planners and identify less-understood or -researched areas in the Canadian context.
Words cannot adequately describe the fulfillment I get from teaching urban studies and city planning and my gratitude for the opportunity to do it. I am learning so much each and every day, and I hope my students are too, and are having fun at the same time.
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