Module description
This module takes a cultural approach to the study of cities and draws on a range of artistic sources (cinema, literature, architecture, painting, and music) to analyse representations of urban change since the 1850s. A key focus is on the experiences and representations of modernity and post-modernity in the metropolitan centres of Europe and the US (especially London, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles) but students will be encouraged to connect these examples to cities in other parts of the world. Specific emphasis is placed on how identity categories such as class, gender, race and sexuality inform cultural and urban landscapes.
Assessment details
1 x 2500 word essay
Educational aims & objectives
The objectives of the module are:
- To familiarise students with the key work in cultural urban geography, but also interdisciplinary scholarship on modernism and postmodernism
- To reflect critically on how identity categories such as class, gender, race and sexuality inform cultural aesthetics and urban landscapes.
- To enable students to think about their everyday life/environment (space, society and culture) through the lens of social and cultural geographical theory.
- To enable students to 'read' different 'cultural texts' through a spatial perspective.
Learning outcomes
At the completion of this module students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of key theoretical debates in urban cultural geography specifically in relation to terms such as modernity, modernism, and postmodernism. Students should also be able to critically analyse cultural ‘texts’ of various kinds.
Teaching pattern
20 hrs lectures
The lectures and seminars for this module cover the following topics:
- Modernity, Modernism and the City
- The Creative City
- Necropolis: urban destruction
- Modernist Architecture and Urban Planning
- Fordism and Post-War Suburbanism
- Post-Fordism and the New Urban Social Movements
- Postmodernism
- Gentrification
- Memory and the city