This lecture focuses on the history of the American city, suburbia, public transportation, the role of technology and government, the American downtown, and the impact of mobility and density.

1. Introduction
2. Normative Theory I: The City as Supernatural
3. Normative Theory II: The City as Machine
4. Normative Theory III: The City as Organism
5. Descriptive and Functional Theory
6. Dimensions, Patterns, Agreements, Structure, and Syntax
7. The Early Cities of Capitalism
8. Transformations I: London
9. Transformations II: Paris
10. Transformations III: Vienna and Barcelona
11. Transformations IV: Chicago
12. Transformations V: Panopticism, St. Petersburg and Berlin
13. Utopianism as Social Reform and Built Form
14. 20th Century Realizations: Russia and Great Britain
15. City Form and Process
16. Spatial & Social Structure I: Theory
17. Spatial & Social Structure II: Bipolarity
18. Spatial & Social Structure III: Colony & Post-colony
19. Form Models I: Modern and Post-modern Urbanism
20. Form Models II: Open-endedness and Prophecy
21. Form Models III and IV: Rationality and Memory
22. Cases I: Public and Private Domains
23. Cases II: Suburbs and Periphery
24. Cases III: Post-urbanism and Resource Conservation
25. Cases IV: Hyper and Mega-urbanism
26. Conclusion: Towards a Theory of City Form
27. Teaching 4.241J/11.330J: Embracing Complexities of Urbanism

This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.



Topics are categorized into three sections. The first examines the nature of city form theory through examples of traditional attempts to specify "goodness," recent attempts to explain how cities perform, and selected systematic claims on city form theory. The second section focuses on the modern city from its genesis in northern Europe in the late eighteenth–century and discusses in detail the inventions that created it and formed the basis of the contemporary city. The third section attempts to build on the previous sections by concentrating on current theory and practice, in particular on city form process, spatial and social structure, and form models.