Urban Studies

This course examines the distinctive role of “field trip” in understanding and researching the city we live through a series of guided tours. It stresses that engaging urban issues ‘out there’ is more than a complementary tool of collecting data, but also a reflexive practice that enables affective learning, changing our preconceptions, inspiring us to consider possible interventions. Selected tours covering cutting-edge urban development issues in town are provided to demonstrate the diverse functions of field-based learning in different urban milieu. It will examine the changing concepts of the ‘field’ in future city, and how we can represent urban problems by organizing a framework of destinations and experience.

Cities have become major actors on environmental policy. However, the crosscutting nature of environmental problems involves the city in a web of relationships with other levels of government and non-governmental actors. Therefore, the understanding of environmental policy in cities raises the need to unveil the “black box” of the different dimensions of governance (urban, metropolitan, multi-level). The aim of the course is to introduce students to the complexity of implementing public policies in urban contexts through the particular complexities of the environmental issues. For such purpose, the course addresses the basic concepts of policy analysis, the different discussions and theories on governance and orients them towards the specific case of environmental problems in different contexts. Particular attention is placed on air quality, mobility, and climate change.

What is the relationship between a city’s structure and the way it is represented? This course investigates this question by analyzing Florence’s urban history and its visual representation in paintings, frescoes, maps, photographs, and films from the 1200s to today. As the city has been in turn the site of a proud communal society, the main center of the Medici and then Lorraine rule, the capital of newly unified Italy and the repository of national and international cultural and ethical (and touristic) values, we examine how Florence has been both shaped by and represented according to different political and cultural agendas, and how the city’s structure and its representation have constantly affected each other. Special emphasis is devoted to the emergence of photography and cinema and the radical visual and conceptual shift that these media have produced in the city’s image. Some of the issues this course explores are: the role of linear perspective as a scientific and political tool for representing, conceptualizing, and controlling urban space; the ways in which the city has been reconfigured and portrayed by foreigners from the 1600s on; and photography’s and cinema’s potential for addressing compelling urban issues such as the contrast between memory and urban modernization, the elusive relationship of past preservation and mass tourism, and the enmeshment of notions of tourism and surveillance. 

This course explores theories and practices pertaining to urban sustainability, focusing on the fundamental issue that gives rise to the notion of sustainability—the integrity of the Earth's life-supporting system. It examines global and local environmental issues, as well as consequential socioeconomic problems, arising from urban development and continuous urban growth. It also explores existing and emerging approaches to urban sustainability. Throughout the course, students are challenged to contemplate on the core of the quest of urban sustainability—the relationship between humans and nature. Assessment: six in-class assignments (25%), two homework assignments (30%), one paper (25%), preparation and participation (20%).

This course explores social and political issues concerning the city of Rome. It provides background on the role of the city in the unification of Italy, and then focuses chiefly on the period following the Second World War. Topics include the image of Rome in popular culture, the modern evolution of the city as a physical entity, the migration of southerners to the city, the dynamics of family, and the role of gender. Soccer is examined with particular reference to citizen participation. Local criminality is put in a national context. Other topics include the church, the education system, and government. Final consideration is given to Rome as a European capital city. Throughout the course, attention is paid to relevant administrative issues and social contexts in an attempt to gain a vision of Rome as seen in Italian and European perspectives.