Welcome to 11.401 Intro to HCED!

MIT Department of Urban Studies & Planning

11.401 Intro to Housing, Community, and Economic Development

Fall 2020

The Power of Protest & the Quest for Justice & Equity in the American City

[Vision + Community + Housing + Development = Revitalized Cities]

Image: Miguel Luciano, “Mapping Resistance: The Young Lords in El Barrio”

The Power of Protest: What is your vision for the cities we need to build?

“(W)e discovered that what was missing from our school, from other schools, from the journals and exhibitions and manifestos, was missing not because it had been neglected, but because it had been expelled. We discovered that during a specific period of the recent past, amidst the turmoil of the 1960s, a struggle had arisen within the academy over the social role of the architectural profession. Students and their mentors among the planning-oriented faculty confronted the proponents of aesthetic purity and the holders of institutional power.” Perspecta 29 (1998, MIT Press)

Course Description:

More than 80% of Americans live in cities yet the jury is out on whether these forms of built environment are just and equitable for the people who depend on them most for their promise of economic opportunity, safety and social connectivity. This course asks what kinds of cities are we planning to build, for whom and to what end? The current moment of racial revolt and coronavirus pandemic requires bold commitments to anti-racist academic analysis and urban planning practice. The production of academic and technocratic knowledge systems has historically been a lead enabler of economic, social and racial disparities.

By centering a range of theorists, critics and activists both inside and outside of the academy and examining the role of protest, critique and dissent as essential vectors for expanding the possibilities for everyday life, this course will introduce multiple modes for understanding how policy, direct action, research, institutional forms and old-fashioned conversation hold the keys to lasting social change, racial reconciliation and economic repair. Each of these modes of knowing and acting has transformed the creation of housing, community and economic development plans across the United States. Yet, the neo-colonial legacy of urban planners’ practice of viewing urban environments and their inhabitants as problems to be solved by powerful decision-makers and experts located elsewhere and often racially identified as “white” has canonized a narrow set of approaches and values. And, while blackness and African-American populations, in particular, take center stage within many classic U.S. studies and formal discourses of the field, black people themselves are strangely absent as actors, theorists and problem-solvers. These are tendencies that we will note and critique in an on-going effort to strengthen the revelatory power and interpretive ethics of our epistemological framework.

The course is divided into four parts all framed by “the power of protest” as a value claim contextualizing action, critique and debate as constitutive of the urban imaginary and its material, political and cultural expression. The lessons of history will also inform our understanding of the present moment while hopefully pointing toward new, unrealized possibilities for a future of collective action. Cities have always been imagined as offering an alternative to another way of life; the question before us remains: “What new alternative do we imagine we need today?”

Faculty: Karilyn Crockett kcrock@mit.edu

Class:Tuesdays, 5:30pm - 7:00pm (EST) & Thursdays, 8:00am - 9:30am (EST)

Location: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97462722128

Office Hours: Thursdays, 7:00pm - 8:30pm (EST)

Sign up: http://dusp.mit.edu/oh

TA: Enjoli Hall enjoli@mit.edu

Drop-in Office Hours: Thursdays, 11:00am - 12:30pm (EST)

Location: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91822123923

Please email to schedule an appointment outside office hours.