Urban Imaginary and the Metropolitan City - Detailseite

With readings from cultural studies, urban studies, art history and urban cultural history, thecourse will aim at developing an understanding of the concept of ‘urban imaginary’ which is defined by Andreas Huyssen as “the way city dwellers imagine their own city as the place of everyday life, the site of inspiring traditions and continuities as well as the scene of histories of destruction, crime, and conflicts of all kinds”. As the cultural experience of modernity is embedded in the visual and physical space from the late nineteenth century on, the city has

been a conflicted place of economic and social upheaval, affecting class, racial and gender divisions, and producing contested public and private domains within its boundaries. This course examines the experiences of that modernizing urban world in its complex interactions with globalisation, through the theoretical texts as well as the narratives of contemporary arts, urban photography, film and literature, from a variety of historical, cultural, geographical, or transnational perspectives. We will specifically consider and discuss the concept of ‘urban

imaginary’ which creates material, virtual or imagined public spaces focusing on the following issues: alternative approaches to modernities and the city; the nationalist, regional, global representation of cities; transformation, rebuilding, musealisation of memory placesand reinvention of history for spatial politics; national or institutional representation at national and international events; urban imaginary and its material effects on urban transformation, community interaction and architecture, etc. We will specifically focus on and compare the cities of Berlin and Istanbul, referring to a variety of other metropolitan cities. Students will be encouraged to develop projects that situate their place in the cities by a variety of visual and textual reflections on the city.

Selected texts and chapter from:

Agnew, J.A., ed. The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations.  Boston:

Unwin Hyman, 1989.

Binder, B. “Capital Under Construction: History and the Production of Locality in Contemporary Berlin.”

Ethnologia Europaea: Journal of European Ethnology . 31 (2), (2001): 19 – 40.

Blum, A. The Imaginative Structure of the City . Montreal: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 2006.

Boyer, C. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments.  Cambridge,

MA; London, UK: The MIT Press, 1996.

Boym, S. The Future of Nostalgia . New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Certeau, M. The practice of everyday life . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Cosgrove D. and S. Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation,

Design, and Use of Past Environments.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Crouch, D. “The Street in the Making of Popular Geographical Knowledge.” In Images of the Street , edited by

N.R. Fyfe, 158–172. London: Routledge, 1997.

Dillion, B. Ruins . Cambridge, MA; London, UK: The MIT Press, 2011.

Docherty, T. Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Friedman, A. “A Sense of the Past.” Journal of Society of Architectural Historians . 69 (4): (2009). 484 – 489.

G.ktürk, D., et al. Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe.  London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

Gür, B. “Spatialisation of Power/Knowledge/Discourse, Transformation of Urban Space Through Discursive

Representations in Sultanahmet, Istanbul”. Space and Culture , 5(3), (2002): 237-252.

Harvey, D. The Condition of Postmodernity . Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2004.

Huyssen, A. Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age . Durham and London: Duke

University Press, 2008.

Huyssen, A. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory . Stanford, CAA: Stanford University

Press, 2003.

Huyssen, A. The Voids of Berlin. Critical Inquiry , 24 (1) (Autumn, 1997): 57-81.

King, A. D..‘Re-presenting World Cities: Cultural Theory/Social Practice’, in World Cities in a World System ,

edited by P.L. Knox and P.J. Taylor, 215–231. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Kwon, M. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity . Cambridge, MA; London, UK:

The MIT Press, 2004.

Ladd, B. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape . University Of Chicago

Press, 1998.

Lefebvre, H. Production of Space.  USA, UK, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

Low; S. M. “The Anthropolgy of Cities: Imagining and theorizing the City.” Annual Review of Anthropology  25

(1996): 383 – 409.

Lynch, K. The Image of the City . Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Press, 1996.

Menin, S. Constructing Place: Mind and Matter of Place-Making . London and New

York: Routledge, 2003.

Nora, P. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past.  Columbia University Press 1993.

Sassen, S. The Global City.  New York, London, Tokyo: Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Soja, E. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory.  London: Verso, 1989.

Stieber, N. Microhistory of the Modern City: Urban Space, Its Use and Representation. Journal of the Society of

Architectural Historians , 58 (3) (1999): 382 – 391.