Downtown
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this seminar on the American downtown from the late nineteenth century through the late twentieth. The course treats downtown as an idea, a physical place, and a cluster of competing interests, tracing how subways, skyscrapers, highways, urban renewal programs, and retail centers reshaped city centers over a century. Sessions are built around assigned readings and in-class discussion rather than lectures, and students complete an individual research project on a downtown-related topic of their choosing. Materials available include the syllabus, reading lists, and assignment descriptions from MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. There is no video component; the course is designed for seminar-style engagement with primary and secondary sources on American urban history. Free to access through MIT OpenCourseWare, with no certificate offered.