Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructor: Weihong Bao, Michael Dear

Term: Spring 2014

Course #: CYPLAN 291, FILM 240, CHINESE 280

Why Read This Case Study?

More than half the world’s population live in cities, resulting in a huge variety of urban forms, cultures, politics, problems and conflicts. Many academic disciplines – ranging from the urban social sciences to history and environmental design – have traditionally taken ‘the city’ as their object of study. More recently, the field of cinema studies has focused on explorations of cities as portrayed and imagined across times, places and cultures.

This graduate research seminar, The City and its Moving Images, was led by city planner and geographer Michael Dear and Wei Hong Bao, an expert on film, media, and East Asian languages and cultures. The seminar included students from a variety of disciplines including architecture, film studies, performance studies, and environmental science and policy, and East Asian studies. Students thus came to the course with a wide range of theoretical and practical ideas about cities.

Students interrogated foundational theoretical literature on cities, focused on social theory and media theory; how filmmakers see the city; urban globalization; and the urban question after modernity. They quickly realized that their ideas were rooted in widely divergent academic understandings, generating lively debate and discussion, and a “concordance” exercise that mapped terms/ideas about cities to arrive at a common understanding and analytic framework. Then, students explored questions about cities and urban representation via hands-on projects ranging from the production of a field guide to gentrification to an architectural zoetrope, interactive websites, architectural installations on urban space and power, a poster/photograph collage visualizing urban social movements and a “Dérive Machine” a la Guy Debord, generating random walks to discover the city.