Slum, Ghetto, Blight: Architectural and Urban Formations of Difference Arch 603_2 Prof. Andrew Herscher Tuesday 4:00-7:00pm Instruction mode: online, synchronous and asynchronous This seminar assays a critical history of architectural and urban difference, seeking out the history of difference as an object of architectural and urban knowledge and action. Focusing on the global history of “slums,” “ghettos,” and “blight,” we will approach difference as a condition that is both discursively and materially distributed across buildings and cities—a spatialization of risk, threat, and danger that leads the state, business interests, social reformers, and their architectural and urban planning emissaries to intervene in, transform, and sometimes destroy the spaces and lives of marginalized urban communities, and reciprocally leads those communities to define and organize themselves and their world. Our investigation will proceed on three levels. On one level, we will track the history of “slums,” “blight,” and “ghettos” as objects of architectural and urban knowledge. This history, explored in the main readings for the seminar, will begin with mid 19th c. housing reform in England, move to housing reform, urban development, and urban renewal in the 20th c. United States, and end with contemporary accounts of informal and subaltern urbanism in the Global South. On a second level, we will study the history of “slums,” “blight,” and “ghettos” in Detroit within larger national and global histories. This study will proceed through reading of primary sources and work on material in relevant archives and libraries at the University of Michigan. On a third level, each student will choose a topic related to the themes of the seminar to explore in a research project.