Hum 25071 - Dreaming the Democratic City: From Ancient Greece to the New Times Square

Instructor: Antti Moelsae

Mondays/Thursdays, 9:45-11:00 a.m.  

The subject of cities and urban space has always excited serious philosophers, thinkers, and writers. Plato’s Republic represents the first attempt to develop a comprehensive conception and image of an ideal city, or polis, where notions of justice and human virtue prevailed   However, what we today would understand as urban policy and planning first developed during the nineteenth century with the Enlightenment ideas of the urban planner Baron Haussmann, whose remaking of Paris first problematized the city as a place of competing class interests, shared civic ideals, and dangerous crowds.  With the examples of London and New York, we see urban spaces as producing new political and social problems, from civic unrest and urban decay to unsanitary housing conditions and a criminal “underground.” A number of Enlightenment philosophers such as Rousseau questioned the city as a place where civilization ran amok.  Meanwhile, modern urban visionaries such as Frederick Law Olmstead (with his grandiose civic visions for New York’s Central Park), Ebenezer Howard (with his garden-city movement in Britain), and Le Corbusier (with his modernist dreams of a perfected architectural order) imagined utopian futures for twentieth-century metropolises. With a stress on interdisciplinary theoretical and philosophical questions, we will read and analyze seminal texts on cities from twentieth-century and contemporary thinkers such as Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, David Harvey, Robert Venturi, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Engels, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Georg Simmel as we draw on their ideas to reflect on the city of today.

Among the questions the class will consider: How did the layout of the Greek polis shape democratic aspirations? How did Enlightenment philosophical values determine urban physical realities? When did the metropolis become associated with such traits as impersonality, detachment, and anonymity (from the philosophical perspective of Simmel, aspects of urban life that are not necessarily negative)? How do contemporary efforts at “gentrification,” from New York City’s High Line to the New Time Square, change the urban fabric? This class combines historic, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to ideas of urbanity and built environments.  Students will be encouraged to consider New York-area sites and institutions when they are relevant to the class’s concerns. Course requirements: A mid-term paper and a final paper.