Urban Studies

In antiquity, the city as idea and as experience provided a central trope for Greeks and Romans to think about their place in the world, their social and political organization, the relationship between culture and nature, self and other, morality, and history. This course focuses particularly on the presence of urban everyday life in classical literature and asks students to explore ancient representations through the lenses of cultural history and current critical approaches to the city. Our starting point is to think about what is ‘natural’ to us and put it at a critical distance: the ways in which the city has featured in literature and film in modernity. Students proceed to explore the extent to which these modern representations and their cultural context find antecedents in antiquity. Students pay special attention to urban space (house/home, street, theater, baths and barbershops) as well as time and occasion (city at night, erotic city, landscapes of disaster, routine).

This course provides a study of the city as a social construction. It also looks at the link between the multiple social relationships that take place in the urban environment and the spatial support that contains them. Topics covered include: history of the European city; the city in sociological theory; the urbanization of the world; urban dynamics and processes; urban politics.