OFFICE HOURS
Prof. Smith’s office hours in Fall 2025 are on Wed and Thu 2–4 in Milstein 716
Sign up here.
Prof. Nick R. Smith currently teaches in the Architecture Department and the Urban Studies Program at Barnard College, Columbia University. His teaching emphasizes participation, collaboration, diversity, and reflexivity in the decolonization of urban knowledge.
Smith teaches the following courses:
The City: Thinking with the Urban Built Environment provides an introduction to principles of urban design. Primarily designed for first- and second-year students, this experiential course engages New York City as our classroom, guiding students to use drawing as a means for analyzing urban form.
Urban Elsewheres: Exploring a World of Cities explores the diversity of international urban conditions as a basis for critically interrogating our most basic assumptions about how and urbanization happens and why it matters.
Urbanizing China investigates the dramatic urban transformation that has taken place in mainland China over the last four decades. The course considers the historical context of Chinese urbanization, China's contemporary urban-rural divide, and the lived experience of urbanization in China.
Urban Revolution: The City in Politics critically examines the ways that space matters in processes of political contestation.
The Just City: Global Debates in Urban Planning and Policy investigates normative issues central to the discipline of urban planning and their application to specific case studies around the world.
Global Urban Research Lab is a Junior Seminar in the Urban Studies curriculum focused on comparative methods in urban research.