Sections offered SPRING 2019:

CLASS NOTES:  IUB GenEd World Culture credit; Study Abroad

The course explores the spatial forms of the global city. This task faces a fundamental challenge. On the one hand, global cities are precisely known for lacking clear and distinct forms. Many terms highlight the unprecedented amorphousness and dispersion of today’s cities: “megalopolis,” “metapolis,” “ex-urbs,” “informational city,” “technoburb,” “in-between city,” or “exopolis,” to name a few. On the other hand, however, the singular notion of city and the need to identify a form, a “good city form,” continue to be necessary to understand the urban conditions of globalization.

Rather than studying the city from strictly urbanist or architectural approaches, the course will engage in a variety of theoretical texts that reflect on the city as a place but also as a question. The course will begin by drawing a historical genealogy of the Greek polis, the Italian city-state, the modern metropolis, the colonial city, and the global megacity. The central part of the course will consist in a critical map of continental urban typologies: the European city transformed by tourism and the culture industry; the American city made of suburbanization and ghettoization; the Asian city of endless series of unconnected buildings; and the African city of creative chaos and informal disorder. The last section will focus on the more dramatic aspects of global urban formlessness: the so-called instant city of refugee camps, and the city in ruins of permanent war zones, particularly in the Middle East.

The course will also include an experiential component. The study abroad program “Walking a Global City: Beijing” will take place in Beijing during Spring Break. The trip to Beijing aims to complement the course by offering a direct, first-hand experience of urban space in a foreign and yet fully globalized city. Thus, the exploration of the Chinese capital will seek to examine the more concrete ways in which space determines the social and cultural life of human communities. This exploration will be based on one old-fashioned but highly productive practice, namely to walk the city. Even if Beijing is a megalopolis, most areas are pedestrian-friendly and well connected through the metro system.

Five thematic walks focused on History, Finance, Religion, Knowledge, Sport, and Art will organize the content of the program. Thus, these Beijing Walks, complemented with the previous reading of essays on urbanism and also with the pedagogical use of technology for the capturing of city life, will allow students to study the contradictions of the urban text while discovering its diverse components, from the architectural masterpieces to the popular neighborhoods, from the government buildings to the layout of affluent communities. The direct experience of this colossal megacity will help students not only to understand its formal dynamics but also to detect the structural tendencies of today’s urbanism.

Inscribed in the “Many Worlds, One Globe” project, this course seeks to compare urban typologies to understand the abstract and concrete ways by which space determines the social and cultural life of human communities. The ultimate goal of the course is help students awaken their “spatial consciousness,” a preparatory task that is indispensable before any attempt at changing the world.