Special Topic: Imaginaries and Technospaces: The Sociology of Urban Life

Description

****PLEASE NOTE THIS COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELLED****

This course is an interdisciplinary option combining historical, literary and social science approaches to the city. The first section of the course will deal with the city as it was by looking at topics covering the creation and evolution of the modern city and the modern urban subject. These include: the flaneur and street life; architecture and urban modernity;  the notion and experience of the 'soft city' and urban identity. This section derives from a historical-literary approach and also includes insights and critiques from the history of sociology and urban studies.

The second section, and major part of the course, is concerned with the city as it is experienced today: as shifting mixes of public and private spaces in which disruptions provoke different points of view, multiple memories and complex associations. It focuses on cities as constantly changing networks and configurations of technospaces of visible and invisible technologies meshing with always provisional, embodied lives. Topics covered will be concerned with the multiplicity of processes assembling and reassembling the city in different ways. These include: the mobile city; mapping the ‘authentic’ city; the sentient city; the invisible city; the global city; cities as entertainment machines; nature and the city; deterritorialization and the futures of urban public space. Christchurch, as both colonial site of a neo-gothic garden city and re-imagined postcolonial site of disaster, risk and vitality, circulates throughout the course.