Urban Visions: Art, Design and Film in the Modern City

Course Content:

This module aims to engage students with the many ways in which visual cultures of the
modern city - and responses to them, in design, architecture, visual art, digital media and
film - vitally determine everyday life and perceptions of the environments we inhabit.

The module will trace the lineage of the contemporary city through a sequence of closely
interconnecting strands examining the correlations and crossovers between visual art,
architecture and moving-image media at pivotal moments of preoccupation with the
urban, across a wide historical span.

A particular emphasis is placed on vision and concepts of visuality (panoramic, the gaze,
the glance, surveillance), and the module will invite students actively to participate in
conceptual projects around the 'envisioning' of urban space, through readings of urban
components such as hoardings, practices of urban engagement such as walking and
documenting.

Topics covered may include:
? Histories of the rise of the metropolis and its cultures, in late 19C Europe, USA
and Asia
? Preoccupations with the modernist city in the media of visual art, film and
architecture
? The design of urban spaces as key experiential sites: hotels, cinemas, shopping
centres
? Cities as power-formations and as zones of arts-inspired activism, rebellion,
reinvention
? Writing and transiting the modern city, from Simmel and Kracauer to Debord and
Bruno
? Seminal cities: Urban case-studies in art, design and film: for example - 1900s
Berlin, 1920s Paris, 1950s New York, 1960s Tokyo, 1970s Los Angeles, 1990s
London, 2010s Bangkok
? Moving-image forms as urban-media: city-films, digital hoardings, portable
screens
? Dystopia, abandonment, depopulation, surveillance: cities as 'problems' in art,
design and film
? The design of everyday life in the city and its artefacts
? Speed, sensation, excess, overload: art as the 'analysis' of urban perception
? The city as the locus of art works: performance-art in urban space, public
sculpture.

Autumn semester:
? Envisioning the city
? The word on the street ? urban narratives
? We build this city?
? Art on the Underground / writing skills workshop
? The Artist?s City (Paris, London and the formation of the Avant-Garde)
? Cities, artistic disciplines, and misrecognition
? Cities as sites of creativity
? A spreading of avant-garde: Prague, Moscow
? Art as urban intervention: Sculpture in the city
? From still to moving image: the city in motion

Spring semester:
? Temporal city
? Where is Dystopia?
? Brand City
? The city, memory and typology; Collage City; Roma Interotta
? The Delirious, the suburban and the Generic: Koolhaas on New York, Atlanta and
Singapore
? The megalopolis: Asia and Africa / Doing business in the city: Koolhaas on
Shenzen and Lagos
? City futures

Teaching: Lectures, discussion-based seminars, screenings, museum visits, walks, study groups

Assessment:
STUDY OPTION 1:
? Photo essay with critical commentary (1,000 words) (20%)
? Group presentation based on an aspect of a particular city (30%)
? Research project: ?writing the modern city? (50%)
STUDY OPTION 2 OR 3: essay (2,500 words) (tbc)

Study Option 1 = Whole Year
Study Option 2 = Autumn
Study Option 3 = Spring/summer