Lehrende: Prof. Dr. phil. Dieter Schott
Veranstaltungsart: Übung
Orga-Einheit: FB02 / Geschichte (Institut)
Anzeige im Stundenplan: Übung NG 1
Fach:
Anrechenbar für:
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 25
Lehrinhalte: In this course conducted in English we will read, analyse and interpret ‚classic texts‘ on the city mainly from British or US-American background. With the rise of the industrial and modern city at the middle of the nineteenth century a new discourse on the city and urban life emerged. This was no longer dominated by moral perceptions – the city as ‚Sodom and Gomorha‘, a place of moral depravation. Rather, the new view put more emphasis on the environmental aspects of the industrial city, the all-pervasive smoke, and also on the restlessness and the lack of human emotions within the new capitalist urban society. The ‚industrial‘ novels of the Victorian era such as ‚Hard Times‘ by Charles Dickens or ‚North and South‘ by Elizabeth Gaskell are characterised by the astonishment over the new industrial city. Towards the end of the nineteenth century utopian visions, such as William Morris‘ novel ‚News from Nowhere‘ imagined the disappearance of large cities like London and Ebenezer Howard’s ‚Garden cities‘ supplied the practical blueprint for such aspirations. In the twentieth century scholarly urban research aimed to identify the causes of human behaviour in cities, as Georg Simmel attempted in his classic ‚Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben‘. The Chicago School of Sociology intended to identify ‚natural‘ laws governing the rise and decline of urban quarters. Town planning strove to remedy the faults of the ‚old‘ city and projected new ‚ideal‘ cities, as was the intention in LeCorbusiers ‚Charte of Athens‘ which became the platform for modern town planning and urban development in the postwar-era. However, the more cities were being remodeled according to the blueprints of modern planners, the more unease and criticism arose among intellectuals who found the resulting city deficient. This critique was most eloquently spelled out by Jane Jacobs. In the unruly 1970s we then have a new political contestation in and around cities and a reappraisal of old houses and heritage which brought about comprehensive paradigm changes in town planning and urban development policy. The aim of the course is twofold: We will train and develop the capacity to read and interpret sources, a key competence for historical and social science scholarship. On the other hand we aim to get an understanding, how the discourse over cities and urban life developed from the middle of the 19th century. The course is addressed towards students of History, but also students of Social Sciences and Architecture with a strong interest in the historical dimension of urbanization are very welcome.
Literatur: Gary Bridge/ Sophie Watson (eds.): The Blackwell City Reader. Second Edition, Chichester 2007 Peter Hall: Cities of Tomorrow. An intellectual history of urban planning and design in the twentieth century, Malden (Mass.) 32007. Richard LeGates/ Frederic Stout (eds.): The City Reader. Fourth edition, London/ New York 2007 Jacques Levy (Ed.): the City. Critical Essays in Human Geography, Aldershot/ Burlington, VT 2008Rolf Lindner: Walks on the wild side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung, Frankfurt/Main 2004
Online-Angebote: moodle
