This course is a sequel to 21G.113 Chinese V (Streamlined). It is designed to further help students develop sophisticated conversational, reading and writing skills by combining authentic reading and audio-visual material with their own explorations of Chinese speaking societies, using the human, literary, and electronic resources available at MIT, in the Boston area and on the web. Some special features of Chinese societies, cultures and customs will be introduced. The class consists of readings, discussion, student presentations and network exploration. The course is conducted in Mandarin.

This course is the continuation of 21G.104/108. It is designed to further help students develop sophisticated conversational, reading and writing skills by combining traditional textbook material with their own explorations of Chinese speaking societies, using the human, literary, and electronic resources available at in the Boston area. Some of special features of Chinese society, its culture, its customs and habits, its history, and the psychology of its people are be introduced. The class consists of reading, discussion, composition, network exploration, and conversational practice. The course is conducted in Mandarin.

6.002 is designed to serve as a first course in an undergraduate electrical engineering (EE), or electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) curriculum. At MIT, 6.002 is in the core of department subjects required for all undergraduates in EECS.
The course introduces the fundamentals of the lumped circuit abstraction. Topics covered include: resistive elements and networks; independent and dependent sources; switches and MOS transistors; digital abstraction; amplifiers; energy storage elements; dynamics of first- and second-order networks; design in the time and frequency domains; and analog and digital circuits and applications. Design and lab exercises are also significant components of the course. 6.002 is worth 4 Engineering Design Points. The 6.002 content was created collaboratively by Profs. Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey H. Lang.
The course uses the required textbook Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits. Agarwal, Anant, and Jeffrey H. Lang. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Elsevier, July 2005. ISBN: 9781558607354.

This course’s aims are two-fold:

to offer students the theoretical and practical tools to understand how and why cities become torn by ethnic, religious, racial, nationalist, and/or other forms of identity that end up leading to conflict, violence, inequality, and social injustice; and
to use this knowledge and insight in the search for solutions

As preparation, students will be required to become familiar with social and political theories of the city and the nation and their relationship to each other. They also will focus on the ways that racial, ethnic, religious, nationalist or other identities grow and manifest themselves in cities or other territorial levels of determination (including the regional or transnational). In the search for remedies, students will be encouraged to consider a variety of policymaking or design points of entry, ranging from the political- institutional (e.g. forms of democratic participation and citizenship) to spatial, infrastructural, and technological interventions.

Citizen participation is everywhere. Invoking it has become de rigueur when discussing cities and regions in the developing world. From the World Bank to the World Social Forum, the virtues of participation are extolled: From its capacity to “deepen democracy” to its ability to improve governance, there is no shortage to the benefits it can bring. While it is clear that participation cannot possibly “do” all that is claimed, it is also clear that citizen participation cannot be dismissed, and that there must be something to it. Figuring out what that something is — whether it is identifying the types of participation or the contexts in which it happens that bring about desirable outcomes — is the goal of the class.

Do you want to think about ways to help solve New Orleans’ problems? CityScope is a project-based introduction to the contemporary city. “Problem solving in complex (urban) environments” is different than “solving complex problems.” As a member of a team, you will learn to assess scenarios for the purpose of formulating social, economic and design strategies to provide humane and sustainable solutions. A visit to New Orleans is planned for spring break 2007.

Do you want to think about ways to help solve New Orleans’ problems? CityScope is a project-based introduction to the contemporary city. “Problem solving in complex (urban) environments” is different than “solving complex problems.” As a member of a team, you will learn to assess scenarios for the purpose of formulating social, economic and design strategies to provide humane and sustainable solutions. A visit to New Orleans is planned for spring break 2007.

This class is intended to introduce students to understandings of the city generated from both social science literature and the field of urban design. The first part of the course examines literature on the history and theory of the city. Among other factors, it pays special attention to the larger territorial settings in which cities emerged and developed (ranging from the global to the national to the regional context) and how these affected the nature, character, and functioning of cities and the lives of their inhabitants. The remaining weeks focus more explicitly on the theory and practice of design visions for the city, the latter in both utopian and realized form. One of our aims will be to assess the conditions under which a variety of design visions were conceived, and to assess them in terms of the varying patterns of territorial “nestedness” (local, regional, national, imperial, and global) examined in the first part of the course. Another will be to encourage students to think about the future prospects of cities (in terms of territorial context or other political functions and social aims) and to offer design visions that might reflect these new dynamics.

Using film as a lens to explore and interpret various aspects of the urban experience in both the U.S. and abroad, this course presents a survey of important developments in urbanism from 1900 to the present day, including changes in technology, bureaucracy, and industrialization; immigration and national identity; race, class, gender, and economic inequality; politics, conformity, and urban anomie; and planning, development, private property, displacement, sprawl, environmental degradation, and suburbanization.

This course investigates the relationship between urban architecture and political, social, and cultural history of Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It surveys and analyzes archeological and literary evidence, including the sanctuary of Athena on the Acropolis, the Agora, Greek houses, the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes, and the panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia.

This course introduces undergraduate planning students to the role of the planner in researching issues in cities both in the United States and abroad. This course is a practical, hands-on workshop that challenges students to research, write and present their ideas on two different cities: A U.S. City (preferably somewhere close) and Copenhagen. Students will be equipped to:

select and research a thesis topic,
work professionally with faculty and other experts on the topic of their choice, and
research, write and present.

City to City, as a class, will jump into the complexity of planning in New Orleans, a post-disaster city. City-to-City will ask how a post-disaster city grapple with its ideas of identity, what it is, who it represents, and how it projects its sense of self to residences, businesses, tourists, and to the outside world. In considering its people, how do city planners think about who lives where and why? At the same time, how can city planners celebrate a city’s history and its culture and how can these elements be woven into reconstruction? Students will travel from Cambridge to New Orleans over Spring Break to meet and consult with their alumni clients, and continue to work on projects.

This course is a service-learning, project-based studio course that focuses on collaborative design of civic media. Students will work in diverse teams with community partners to create civic media projects grounded in real-world community needs. This course covers co-design and lean UX methods, and best practices for including communities in iterative stages of project ideation, design, prototyping, testing, launch, and stewardship. Students should have an interest in collaboration with community-based organizations.

The Civic Media Codesign Studio is a project-based studio course in collaborative design of civic media. Students work with a range of organizations to create civic media projects grounded in real-world community needs. It covers theory and practice of codesign, including methods for community participation in iterative stages of project ideation, design, prototyping, testing, launch, and stewardship. This semester, the course will focus on building systems of collaboration between municipal government and local care networks to facilitate effective cocreation of policy.

This course introduces the concepts, techniques, and devices used to measure engineering properties of materials. There is an emphasis on measurement of load-deformation characteristics and failure modes of both natural and fabricated materials. Weekly experiments include data collection, data analysis, and interpretation and presentation of results.

This course centers on mechanisms of civilian control of the military. Relying on the influential texts of Lasswell, Huntington, and Finer, the first classes clarify the basic tensions between the military and civilians. A wide-ranging series of case studies follows. These cases are chosen to create a field of variation that includes states with stable civilian rule, states with stable military influence, and states exhibiting fluctuations between military and civilian control. The final three weeks of the course are devoted to the broader relationship between military and society.

In recent years both scholars and policymakers have expressed a remarkable amount of interest in the concepts of social capital and civil society. A growing body of research suggests that the social networks, community norms, and associational activities signified by these concepts can have important effects on social welfare, political stability, economic development, and governmental performance. This discussion based course examines the roles played by these networks, norms, and organizations in outcomes ranging from local public goods provision and the performance of democracies to ethnic conflict and funding for terrorism.

This graduate seminar examines civic engagement in international, national and local environmental governance. We will consider theories pertaining to civil society development, social movement mobilization, and the relations that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have with governments and corporations. During the course of the semester, particular attention will be given to the legitimacy and accountability of NGOs. Case studies of NGO and community responses to specific environmental issues will be used to illustrate theoretical issues and assess the impacts that these actors have on environmental policy and planning.

This course surveys the social science literature on civil war. Students will study the origins of civil war, discuss variables that affect the duration of civil war, and examine the termination of conflict. This course is highly interdisciplinary and covers a wide variety of cases.

Although attention will be devoted to the causes and long-term consequences of the Civil War, this class will focus primarily on the war years (1861-1865) with special emphasis on the military and technological aspects of the conflict. Four questions, long debated by historians, will receive close scrutiny:

What caused the war?
Why did the North win the war?
Could the South have won?
To what extent is the Civil War America’s “defining moment”?