Course Description

Cities are said to be our greatest inventions. They are demonstrations of human ingenuity, power, and capacity to manipulate resources and the environment. Cities also play crucial roles in transforming human settlement patterns and habitats and in shaping human development on both individual and collective levels. 

In this course, we will start by examining how the unprecedented urbanization since the 18th century has turned our planet into ‘Earthopolis’. We will discuss how cities have become the epicentres by which our human species exerts its widespread, and potentially irreversible, impact on the planet earth, initiating a new geological era identified by many scientists as ‘Anthropocene’. We will guide you to explore the circumstances and process through which different urban civilizations achieved major milestones in the urban form, governance, and culture, shaping the ways we live, work, and play in cities today. We will engage creatively around ideas of sustainable urban development, basic questions of policy and planning, and questions of human flourishing particularly in the urban context. The course will arrange a field trip for you to visit a local cultural, ecological, high-tech, or housing development site so that you will gain a first-hand experience of a metropolitan area in the making.

We invite you to join us in this exciting exploration of the making and remaking of cities from the rise of cities in ancient West Asia since the 4th millennium BC to the conurbation of metropolises and mega-regions in today’s world. By exploring the making of historical, modern, and contemporary cities in different cultures, this course aims to help you develop a critical and comparative understanding of the key issues, motivations, principles, institutions, and processes involved in city-making and how urban forms and functions interact with urban societies, together exuberating visions, beliefs, values, and power whilst shaping individual and collective identities, and experiences. The course will help you gain a deeper understanding of a rich social and cultural diversity in our urban heritage, learn from the rise and fall of urban societies, recognize the ongoing process of city-making, and develop a critical appreciation of the unprecedented scale, multi-functions, and commensurate responsibilities of modern and contemporary urban development. By understanding the basic principles by which cities are planned, designed, and governed in different parts of the world, you will obtain insights for optimising your urban experience. The course will also facilitate your cultivation of an interdisciplinary, historical, and planetary perspective on our urban trajectories so that you will be better equipped to contribute to global and local sustainable development.

[There will be a compulsory fieldtrip scheduled during Reading Week.]

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate a city-scale perspective of society and an integrative understanding of city-making in terms of historical backgrounds and urban form, governance, culture, and life.
2. Navigate through traditions and innovations, and similarities and differences among diverse urban societies in the historical periods covered.
3. Demonstrate an understanding of participation in city-making on international, regional, and local levels.
4. Demonstrate skills related to creativity, communication, and teamwork in order to improve the quality of urban living for themselves and others.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)