The Once and Future City
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this urban studies course examining how American cities take physical form and how that form changes over time. Lectures, readings, workshops, and field trips treat the city itself as a text, with students learning to read street patterns, building types, and neighborhood transitions from downtown cores to suburbs and edge cities. The 2015 iteration centers on MIT's own history, using the university's original Back Bay campus and its move to Cambridge for the 1916 centennial as a case study in urban change. Short field assignments build toward a final project in which students apply the course's analytical tools to a specific place. Materials include the syllabus, assignment sheets, and readings list as published on MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access with no certificate offered.