| Monumental and Insurgent Cities: History, Theory, Literature/Cinema (w/CLit 502B | Kaup | TTh 11:30-1:20 |
Monumental and Insurgent Cities: History, Theory, Literature/Cinema
A near-synonym of human civilization, the city has been the site and subject of cultural production since the beginning of history. The material embodiment of the society that designs and inhabits them, urban architecture and the built environment are expressions of the latter’s social ideals, even utopias. On the other hand (and from a Marxist perspective), the very structure of our modern capitalist cities, including its land-use and activity patterns, is the result of capital in pursuit of profit. (It is no accident that the skyscraper is an American invention, and that this American vernacular urban form was born in America’s nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalist headquarters, Chicago.) In other words: we build our dreams, but our dreams may in turn be informed by a political unconscious structured by social forces, most recently, (late) capitalism. But this is only the monumental city, the concept-city of developers, architects, and planners. There is also the spontaneous, unplanned city of the everyday, the urban user, the insurgent city of a multitude of practices and new urban social movements that operate within the space of the official city.
This is a course combining readings in urban theory, the history of US planning, and fiction and cinema about the city. It includes a trans-american component that extends the conversation beyond the “American” city to the city in “the Americas” (via the examples of Havana and Mexico City), to discuss differences and commonalities in the history of planning in Latin America and the US, and also how US planning movements (esp. the City Beautiful) came to serve imperialist purposes after 1898. The genre of the “city novel” or “cinema on the city” is near-infinite, and we will be discussing a small corpus of representative works of literature & cinema. The main goal of the course, however, is to familiarize students with key movements & paradigms in the history and theory of urban planning in the US after the Civil War (ie. parks movement, tenement reform, company towns, the City Beautiful & City Practical movements, modernist utopias and their postmodern critiques etc.) which are actually situated at the intersection of material culture, social practices and representation.
Readings will be organized around the following sections: 1) Theory: the Official, Planned Concept-City vs. the Unplanned, Insurgent City; via Lefebvre’s Production of Space and his conceptual triad (Representations of Space, Representational Space, Spatial Practices), Jane Jacobs, Michel de Certeau, Leslie Sandercock; 2) Modernist Utopias and their Postmodern Critiques; via Le Corbusier, Jane Jacobs, and Robert Venturi; 3) Manieri-Ella, “Toward an Imperial City: Daniel H. Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement,” focusing on the examples of Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Havana; 4) Parks Movement (Frederick Law Olmsted, including the Parks Plan for Seattle) and Tenement Reform (selections from Riis, How the Other Half Lives); 5) Company Towns and the Reinvention of the US City by Latinos (excerpts from Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism) via Alejandro Morales’ The Brick People (1992); 6) America as Utopia and the Criticism of the Nineteenth-Century Laissez-Faire City; via Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888); 7) The Noir of US Planning History; via Blade Runner and Mike Davis’ critiques of the official heroic narrative of US planning; 8) Mexico City: Chronicles of Everyday Life in the Latin American Metropolis; via Rubén Gallo (ed.), The Mexico City Reader (2004) and Angel Rama.
Assignments comprise a research paper, a mock article/book review, and a presentation on one of the readings.
Texts:
