Cities in Conflict: Theory and Practice
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate seminar on why cities fracture along ethnic, religious, racial, and nationalist lines, and how planners and policymakers might respond. Students first work through social and political theories of the city and the nation, examining how group identities form and manifest at the urban, regional, or transnational scale. The course then turns to remedies, weighing institutional approaches like democratic participation and citizenship models against spatial, infrastructural, and technological interventions. Materials include the syllabus, readings list, and assignments as posted on MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access under a Creative Commons license with no certificate offered. The course draws on case studies of divided cities to ground theory in concrete conflicts, making it suited to students of urban studies, political science, or conflict resolution who want a framework for connecting identity politics to physical urban design and policy.