WEEK ONE: SETTING THE THEORETICAL STAGE Much of this course focuses on a critical and historically contextualized reading ofsociological work on the city. We will read documents and histories drawing out the issues and cases that are in play in theoretical disc ussions in urban studies. In this first week, the readings introduce concepts and methods that will remain valuable throughout the semester both as models and as points for co mparison. Jeff Weintraub‟s essay outlines the ways the public/private dichotomy has been used in social theoretical work, illuminating some ambiguities and wa ys in which scholars talk past each other, as well as p roviding the concepts with enough co ntext that they may be used specifically. Weintraub is more interested in uncovering how these various uses of the dichotomy can be valuable for social analysis than he is in staking out a particular position in the matter, and in this sense he exemplifies the approach to theory in this course. We further consider Jurgen Habermas‟ particular position in the discourse of the public sphere. The essay assigned is essentially a sketch of his work in The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere (1962) , which historicizes changes in public life and argues that with the growth of bourgeois society in the modern era, the relationship between citizens and the state has come to be mediated by a rational-critical public sphere that did not exist in previous social orders. Besides these theories of the public, we‟re also interested in theories of the urban. We take two essays from a volume edited and introduced by Richard Sen nett. In his introduction (pp. 3-12), Sennett locates these works by Weber and Simmel within the “German School” of urban sociology. Max Weber‟s historical -sociological The City traces the urban throughout history with a focus on its institutional makeup, detailing how particular patterns of institutional arr angements brought about and supported cities. The work makes more sense with a brief outline of Weber‟s hierarch y of social structures, which we take from Don Martindale‟s prefatory remarks in a separate edition ofThe City. As Sennett notes, it is “difficult to read… yet Weber‟s work has an enormous power in spite of itself, if the reader is patient and unhurried” (5-6), so when there appears to be no relation between two subsequent sentences, you should pause and try to make one. Finally, we read Simmel‟s 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which will be quoted or referred to by at least one reading in almost every week of the course. The object of his study is not the ancient city, like Weber, but the metropolis as it stood at the end of the nineteenth century. He seeks to relate the mind to the modern city rather than to directly outline the social orders at work in urbanism.