This class examines the history of United States cities as both physical and ideological spaces. Two methods guide the course's approach to urban history. First, readings and discussions engage the ideas of the intellectuals who have guided urban policy over the last two centuries, examining how the work of Daniel Burnham, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and many others have influenced transportation systems, housing construction, and neighborhood design. Second, the class explores the mobilization of ordinary people who live in cities, tracing how poor people, immigrants, people of color, single women, LGBT people and other local groups have shaped sanitation systems, public housing projects, freeway construction, and urban redevelopment. The class situations U.S. urban and metropolitan history in context of broader social processes: industrialization, racialization, migration, the free market, the welfare state, middle class ideology, and the nuclear family, among many others.