The course concentrates on this era because many of the assumptions that underwrite contemporary thinking about urban processes originate in attempts to come to terms with modernity. Beyond the borders of life in any actual city, components of urban culture as we know it and live it are deeply influenced by modes of production, governance and desire established in modernity. It must be useful . Gilles Deleuze Theory operates at multiple levels, some are more consciously employed than others. They are interwoven in the readings and in the visual evidence presented in class.
Every image has unfathomable oneiric depths to which the personal past adds special colours.
Next we consider some philosophical assumptions that inform the rhetoric of governance in the modern city. Then we move to how this framework authorizes capitalist modes of production. Considering theorefical and practical responses to the industrial city is a crucial element in understanding the development of systematic urban theory in this country. Because theory is not context free, our examination of ways of conceiving city life includes consideration of larger cultural practices in which they originated and are now embedded. In the process we will question how modernity forms a bridge between the comfortable narratives of preindustrialization and the fragmented images that are now an ubiquitous component of urban culture.