Urban Studies

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Urban Studies Minor

The 18-credit Urban Studies minor takes an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach to studying all those social, cultural, economic, and political issues that intersect in urban space. Urban Studies is grounded in the politics of space and place-making. Examinations of how meaning is imposed on space—and by whom—are crucial to the study of global and transnational urban contexts.

The Urban Studies minor explores:

• histories of social, economic, and political transformations within urban spaces and the flow of people around the world from rural to urban environments
• public art, public practice, and arts of the city
• particular manifestations of crime and justice in urban spaces
• the economics of urban wealth and poverty
• the effects of the urban space on individual and community health
• social programs and policies born within and for the urban space
• infrastructures of industrialization, de-industrialization, growth, decay, and regeneration
• geographic thought and imagination
• education
• transnational justice and the global sustainability of urban environments
• the historical, cultural, and social dynamics of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, religion, and more as they converge in dense urban spaces

Urban Studies examines city space as a product of histories and processes initiated by all sorts of actors and bodies, from official state policies to localized collectives and communities. To this end, we encourage experiential learning at any of these levels, and welcome creative approaches to engagement. We support community-engaged learning locally as well as internationally, and we are happy to talk to with you about how to fit Urban Studies into your current field in the most productive and energizing way possible.

Urban Studies Program Outcomes

Students with a minor in Urban Studies will be able to:

• Develop a critical and interdisciplinary perspective on the multiple forces that act on individuals and communities in urban spaces, in the U.S. and globally
• Bring multiple disciplines into dialogue to critically assess the relationship between physical and architectural environments and urban life
• Articulate the impact of the arts, literature, and design on re/imagining, defining, and challenging urban environments and culture
• Identify major trends and figures in the historical development of conceptions of justice, equity, health, safety, and a sense of place that have informed both urban spaces and Urban Studies
• Explain chronologies of urban growth and evolution as they map onto histories of labor, migration, industrialization, deindustrialization, environmental and economic health, and transformation
• Envision equitable and alternative approaches to social, economic, political, institutional, and environmental challenges in urban spaces

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