Cities and Cultures: Urban Experience in Comparative Perspective (Level 5)

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Professor Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez
• Tutors: Professor Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez, Professor Akane Kawakami, Dr Ann Lewis, Dr Jackie Jia Lou, Dr Michael Tsang, Dr Damian Catani
• Assessment: a 2000-word essay (40%) and two-hour in-class test (60%)

This team-taught module introduces you to relations between culture and the city from a comparative perspective. We will explore how cultural practices, from the everyday to institutional politics, and cultural forms such as painting, architecture, writing (from graffiti to literature), film, photography, cartography, linguistic landscape and others contribute to the social production of urban space and its representation. We will study cities from different periods, from the eighteenth century to the present, encompassing the intersection of the urban with questions of modernity, gender, revolution, colonialism, nationalism, multilingualism, aesthetic form and memory.

After a conceptual introduction locating the 'spatial' turn in the study of culture, we will cover a series of case studies from cities around the world including Barcelona, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Madrid, Paris, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo, while emphasising similarities and differences, and encouraging a comparative approach between them. Please note, topics and cities will vary year on year, depending on availability of the teaching team.

Indicative syllabus

• The spatial turn: how cultures produce, reproduce and represent the city
• Observing Paris in the 1780s: writing the revolution to come
• Considering the 'Barcelona model' and selling the Mediterranean way of life
• Urban design as place: the Tokyo Toilet Project
• Gendering the city in Berlin
• Modernity and the city: Baudelaire’s Paris
• Walking in the city: practices of everyday life in Paris and New York
• Linguistic landscapes in Shanghai, Hong Kong and London

By the end of this module, you will:

• understand the relation of cultural approaches to the understanding of the city, at a practical level
• have analysed specific cultural and historical conditions producing and representing urban environments from different historical periods and geographical locations
• have explored a number of case studies/cities in depth
• be able to articulate comparisons, pointing to similarities and differences, between the different case studies/cities studied.