This seminar to be taught in conjunction with the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial will allow students to explore the material repercussions of built, neglected, and mythologized environments on those who imagine and inhabit them, and to consider the way the literary arts not only respond to, but contribute to their shape. We will place the literature of the metropolis into dialogue with the writings and plans of architects and urbanists on the one hand, occupant-activists on the other. We will study the creation (and sporadic dismantling) of the city from the perspective of its builders and inhabitants—moving from the nineteenth-century flaneur through Situationism, to the utopian schemes and conceptual architectures of the ‘60s and 70s, and contemporary protest movements. A range of cities, visible and invisible, will be under consideration, with Chicago as our immediate case study. In lieu of a standard research paper, students will be given the opportunity to produce a collaborative atlas of Chicago. They must make time for field trips to the Biennial and to select monuments around the city. (1830-1940, Theory) This is a featured Makers Seminar for English majors, but is open to all students.