The city that surrounds us presents unparalleled opportunities for study and reflection. In this course, we engage the spaces and places of New York in order to learn from them. The focus of our work is on the ordinary settings of everyday life--the streets, sidewalks, shops, playgrounds, parks, waterfronts, buses, subways, bridges, and everything else that makes up the fabric of this great city. We are concerned with the temporal rhythms of the street, the composition of the built environment, the uses of public space, the flows of bodies and things, the relationship of humans with the natural world, and more. To prepare for our forays into the city, we read widely in the literature on ethnography, fieldwork, site studies, and urban thought. Along the way, we undertake short assignments that build skills in fieldwork methods through the study of real places in real time.