From urban ecology to public culture

1. The birth of urban sociology: Chicago School
1.1. Robert Park and Lewis Wirth (The early 20th century)
1.2. Migrants and cities (Chicago, New York, ... ...)
1.3. Urbanization: social differentiation and integration
1.4. Park: Communities, as natural areas, are living in the urban ecology perpetuated by market economy
1.5. Wirth: Urbanism as a way of life
1.5.1. Number
1.5.2. Density
1.5.3. Heterogeneity
1.5.4. Social disorganization
1.5.5. Social (re-)integration: A particular way of life emerges to integrate people together.

2. Marxist approaches
2.1. Manuel Castells
2.1.1. Cities are the integral components of capitalism (class and production system) rather than a nature-like ecology
2.1.2. The crisis of capitalism: class conflict
2.1.3. Class conflicts are caused by over-accumulation of capital and under-investment of labor reproduction (housing, education, ... ...)
2.1.4. State intervention: providing collective consumption
2.1.5. Communities are class-based and urban conflicts are extension of class struggles
2.2. David Harvey
2.3. City as a transformed site of power struggles

3. Politics of urban culture/ urbanism
3.1. Background I: The rise of symbolic economy and cultural institution
Examples: Times Square I, II, III
3.2. Background II: Class politics is replaced by identity politics
3.3. Culture is no longer social cement; instead, it is a contested terrain of representation.
3.4. Public place becomes the stage of new struggles.
3.5. Example: West Kowloon Cultural District

Loft Living Culture and Capital in Urban Change

References
Saunders, Peter. 1981. Social Theory and Urban Question. NY: Holmes & Meier.
Urban Sociology theories
作為一種政治生活的都市文化： 文化研究、城市與香港

Everyday life I: Market

0. Economic geography
0.1. Central place theory
0.2. Paul Krugman: New Economic geography ("cluster effect")

1. "Market": from the perspective of textbook economics
1.1. Market is understood as price mechanism
1.2. Market is portrayed as an/ the economic law
1.3. Market is de-contextualized and a-spatialized.
1.4. Where is the "Market"?

2. Karl Polanyi (1886-1964)
2.1. The Great Transformation
2.2. Markets, exchange and social embedded-ness
-Economy: redistribution, reciprocity and exchange
-Exchange was only an incidental and insignificant component in human activities.
-Markets had been subordinated to social activities, institutions and systems.
-Example I: Kula ring
-Example II: A fresh market in a community
2.5. A self-regulating market
-A ficitious utopia
-An outcome of a series government policies in the 18th and 19th century
-Labor market ("Enclosure", Poor Law, the New Poor Law and Speenhamland Law)
2.6. A self-regulating market against society
-Movement: the expansion of self-regulating market
-Counter-movement or self-protection of society: restricting the self-regulating market (labor movement, labor union, welfare state ...)
2.7. Market is a national institional space perpetuated by ideo-political forces.

3. Fernand Braudel (1902-1985)
3.1. An historican of the Annals School（年鑑學派）
3.2. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century
3.3. He put economics and geography together to analyze our economic activities.
3.4. Economy: Livelihood, markets and capitalism
3.5. Markets
3.5.1. Markets are geographically bounded:
-Roles: peasant, pedlar, porter, fisherwoman, artisan, trader, shop-owner, shop-keeper, ... ...
-village markets and "halls" in towns
-markets in the outskirt of towns
-regional fair
-shopping streets
(The Fair on the Thames, the 17th century)
-long-distance trades (the potentials of capitalism)
3.5.2. The principles of markets
-Good-Money-Good
-competitive
-transparent
-locally and socially embedded (place-bounded)
3.6. Capitalism and markets
3.6.1. The principles of capitalism
-Roles: traders, brokers, money-lenders, bankers, merchants
-Money-Good-Money
(London Royal Exchange)
-monopolistic
-secret
-Redefining and recreating spaces:
*Transgressing geographical boundaries (15th century)-national protection (17th and 18th: age of mercantilism, 19th-early 20th century: industrial age)-globalized (late 20th century-present)
*North Italy-Amsterdam-London
(The story of the Saint George Flag)
3.6.2. Capitalism was and is controlled by a handful of elities
3.6.3. Capitailism is hierarchical
-Capitalism is highly organized and institutionalized (corporate groups)
-It relies on and swallows markets and livelihood
3.7. The spatial implications for economic life
3.7.1. Economic life is differentiated spatially and socially.
3.7.2. The spaces of economies:
-Livelihood (e.g. experiences of home and domestic sphere)
-Markets (e.g. experiences of community, representation of local place and local knowledge)
-Capitalism (e.g. global representations and economic rhetorics)

References
Braudel, Fernand. 1977. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
布羅岱爾1997《資本主義論叢》北京：中央編譯出版社。
Crang, Philip. 1997. "Cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography." Geographies of Econmies. Edited by Roger Lee and Jane Wills. London: Arnold, 1-15.

Commodity culture and spatial representation

*Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century (Walter Benjamin)
1. The fragmented representations of space
1.1. The collapse of city as a concept of organic unity
1.2. The impossibility of defining a city as a whole.
1.3. All wholistic concepts of city are challenged.

2. Political and philosophical ideas (Fourier's "utopia") and building
2.1. Building or architecture?
2.2. Building is not determined by architects.
2.3. The political and philosophical ideas behind building and technology were/are responses to modernity.
2.4. Example: Hong Kong's resettlement housing

3. Commodity culture and commercial space
3.1. From Marxist critique of capitalist economy into commodity culture
3.2. The value form of commodity: use value, exchange value and cultural value
3.3. Exchange value of commodity: commodity fetishism
3.4. Cultural value: Phantasmagoria
-Display value of commodity
-Specialties, novelties and fashion: a timeless world
-Commodity culture and space

4. Visual culture and space
4.1. The development in fine arts (e.g. Art nouveau) and commodity culture
-Arts went beyond the small circle of the bourgeois and aristocratic world
-Commercialization of arts vs. avant-garde
4.2. Urban space is highly visualized.


5. Flaneur: Subjectivity-representations-urban space
5.1. People became alienated from the urban world.
5.2. People connected themselves with the urban world through "eyes".
5.3. The capitalist culture lured the citizens to its phantasmagoria through visual culture.




6. Social-spatial engineering
6.1. City as a spectacle
6.2. Baroque city (The Grand Manner) enables the cities to become spectacles
-Straight street
-Baroque diagonal
-Trivium and polyvium
-Boulevards
-Uniformity
-Variety in unity
-Vista
-Monument
-Ceremonial axis
6.3. The function of Baroque city
-Further alienation of people from the city
-Providing linear perspective for spectators
-Promoting the idea of city as performance
6.4. The historical affinity between spatial-social engineering and capitalist commodity culture

Flesh and stone

1. Modern city: sensory deprivation
1.1. Example: Richard Sennett's friend
-The development of media
-The spatial segregatoin of city
1.2. Body experience-conception of body-urban space

2. Experience, representation and city
2.1. We experience the city through representations.
2.2. Some examples of representations:
-Philosophy (ancient Athen)
-Visual representation (arcades)

3. Nakedness: the citizen's body
3.1. Naked body-beauty-freedom-reason-masculinity
3.2. Public (free men) / private (women, slave, ... ...) worlds.
3.3. Body heat-the heat of words
3.4. Strong body-standing up-strength of reason
Elgin Marbles (1)
Elgin Marbles (2)
Elgin Marbles (3)
3.5. Body interaction-exchange of speech
3.6. Reason: speech-act
3.7. Eros: body, sexual desire, reason, god and city
"homosexuality"
3.8. Agora-polis
-Gathering of human bodies
-Equality
-Reason: speech and body interaction
Agora
Stoa (1)
Stoa (2)
3.9. Theatre
-Passive body vs. active body
-The rise of rhetoric power
-The breakdown of reason
Theatre

4. Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century (Walter Benjamin)
4.1. The representations of space were highly fragmented
4.2. Political and philosophical ideas (Fourier's "utopia"), building, commodity culture and commercial space
4.3. The development in fine arts (Art nouveau)
4.4. Flaneur: Subjectivity-representations-urban space
4.5. Politics and social-spatial engineering

Representation (March 10)

1. Subjectivity and space
1.1. From reason to perception: body experience
1.2. Spatial dynamics: subjectivity-body-environment

2. Subjectivity and cultural studies
2.1. Structuralist and post-structuralist approach
2.2. Three concepts of subjectivity (Stuart Hall)
-Enlightenment concept:a subject of reason
-Sociological concept: an institutional subject
-Post-structuralist concept: a contested terrain of discourses.
2.3. Discourse is a system and process of representation
2.4. Discourse is embedded in power relations (definition)
2.5. Example I: landscape painting and urban merchant class
2.6. Example II: Ocean Terminal and local identity
2.7. Implications for cultural studies: body experience and cultural representations

References: Hall, Stuart. 1992. "Three Concepts of Cultural Identity." Modernity and its Futures. Edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew. Cambridge: Polity, 274-314.

3. Spatial representation and urban elements (Walter Benjamin)
3.1. Arcades
3.2. Panoramas (John Vanderlyn's The Palace and Gardens of Versailles) and photography
3.3. Display of commodities
3.3. Flaneur: a new kind of relationship between subject and object
3.4. Royal gardening-->Urban planning and restructuring
(Versailles 1, 2, 3)

4. Architecture as spatial representation (Robert Twombly)
4.1. Style as a symbolic elements
4.2. Social power
4.3. Example: The canoply of the West Kowloon Cultural District
4.3.1. Norman Robert Foster's (Foster & Partners) techno-modernism and Hong Kong's modernity
-1979/86 - New Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters, Hong Kong
-1992/97 - New Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hong Kong
-1992/98 - Kowloon Canton Railway Station and Ferry Terminal, Hong Kong
-1993 -Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Hong Kong
-2002-WKCD
4.3.2. The transformation of late colonial culture
4.3.3. The image and imagination of globalization or internationalization
4.3.4. The (post-)colonial bureaucrats


References: Hong Kong Places

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Walter Benjamin)

1. Why did Benjamin begin this article with arcades?

2. What is the significance of panoramas to arcade and city?

3. What is flaneur?

4. Why is "novelty" so important to commodity?

5. What is the relationship between Haussmann and Benjamin's understanding of Paris?

Haussmann's Paris--Graphic I
Haussmann's Paris--Graphic II
Barricades (Paris Commune)

Art Nouveau (wikipedia)

Chats/ Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1895-1923)

Chocolate Amatler 1900/ Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939 )

The Kiss / Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

III. Representation, part I (lecture, Mar 10)

"What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke like the facade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored." (Walter Benjamin)

1. Representation of space: the relation between a symbol and an/some idea(s) of a community, a building, ... ...

2. Representation of space and visual culture

3. Project: World Pictures




















4. Linear perspective, landscape and social formation
4.1. Linear perspective ( Leon Battista Alberti, Florence, Italy)
- The horizon line runs across the canvas at the eye level of the viewer. The horizon line is where the sky appears to meet the ground.
- The vanishing point should be located near the center of the horizon line. The vanishing point is where all parallel lines (orthogonals) that run towards the horizon line appear to come together like train tracks in the distance.
-Orthogonal lines are "visual rays" helping the viewer's eye to connect points around the edges of the canvas to the vanishing point. An artist uses them to align the edges of walls and paving stones.
4.2. Imagined relationships
-Subject versus Object: It directs the external world towards the individual
-Detached spectators: Individual is located outside that space
-Power of eyes: It gives the eyes absolute mastery over space.
-Appropriated object: The space is subject to appropriation.

Exploring linear perspective

4.3. Further application in landscape painting
-Landscape painters were sponsored by wealthy urban merchant classes.
-Landscape painting becomes a means of representing wealth and status.
-The space is represented as a natural order
-Historical background: commodification of land and labor, and the rise of capitalism in Europe.
-Example: John Constable (1776-1837) Cornfield

4.4. Alternative representation of rural area in the 19th century
-Gustave Courbet (1819-77)
-Stonebreakers
-A Burial at Ornans











4.4. Landscape is... ...
-A (dominant) way of seeing: realism
-A way structuring the world symbolically
-An imagined matrix of social and power relationships


5. Representation of space and ideology
5.1. Ideology as imagined relations in the social space.
5.2. Ideology as imagined relations between viewers/ producers and the objects.