City Visions: Past and Future
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate seminar on how cities have been understood and designed across history. The first half surveys social science literature on urban history and theory, examining how territorial contexts, from global trade networks to national and regional settings, shaped the form and daily life of cities. The second half turns to design, studying utopian schemes and realized urban plans, and asking what conditions let particular visions take hold. Students assess these designs against the same nested scales of local, regional, national, imperial, and global influence used in the first part of the course, then develop their own proposals for how cities might respond to emerging political and social dynamics. Materials include the full syllabus, reading lists, and assignments as posted by MIT, free to access with no certificate offered.