Global Urban History of Housing Justice

Shelter is one of our most basic human needs. Yet housing, and its legal, social and political meanings and struggles around its distribution, possession and safety, is a concept that can only be fully understood as a historical phenomenon. In the industrializing and urbanizing world, the concept of “housing” emerged at the intersection of questions of property rights, the study of urban problems, and the legal and cultural distinctions between public and private spheres. Throughout the world, the provision of shelter for urban populations has been at the center of urban crises and conflicts, as well as their solutions. This course will examine the deep history of urban segregation, fights for healthy and safe housing, and scholarly and policy debates about the “planet of slums.” The course’s geographic scope is global, using both comparative and transnational approaches, and we will explore the connections between local and global movements and historical processes. Through a historically-oriented but interdisciplinary set of readings, students in this class will become familiar with the terms of debates about the right to shelter as a social, political and legal problem in the modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) world. We will explore how history provides a unique view on how the question of housing is a social justice issue connected to other ones like mass incarceration and the destruction wrought by wars, famines, and intergenerational racial, ethnic and class inequalities. There are no pre- or co-requisites for this class.