This seminar aims to explore the concept of city as an interdisciplinary object of study, mainly its relationship with the concept of culture.
From a chronological perspective, it will focus on relevant cultural Key points in the English/ British History and Culture, contemplating the binomial city/ nation and metropolis/ empire. Social, political and economic factors will be analysed, as well as the role of science and technology, as markers of the material, aesthetical or functional heritage of distinct urban models.
Utopia and dystopia will be studied as imagined cities’ depictions from a conceptual perspective. Rooted in Thomas More’s Utopia and W. Morris’s News from Nowhere, fundamental themes and forms will be approached in contrast with A. Huxley’s Brave New World, or G. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, thus allowing the analysis of the relationship between the work of fiction and its context; utopian text and ideological document; its impact on past and current urban models.

 

Avaliação (na língua de ensino) | Grading and Assessment (in language of instruction)

[Re The work to be developed along the sessions is divided in theoretical and contextual presentations followed by a joint debate based on the scheduled readings. Each student will make a communication on a topic/ work of the programme. He/she will chair a debate on a concept/ theoretical point to draw out the students’ critical and argumentative abilities. He/she will write a review about an item of the recommended bibliography, and a final essay on a theme of his/her choice (previously approved by the seminar’s Supervisor) within the seminar’s scope and research goals. The students are invited to participate in initiatives (communications in conferences; round tables) fostered by Research Centres within the seminar’s field of studies.

Assessment: essay (8.000 to 10.000 words): 36%; oral presentation: 24%; review: 18%; chairing a theoretical debate: 12%; assiduity: 10%.

ferir os elementos de avaliação e o peso relativo de cada um na classificação final]

 

Bibliografia (selection) | Readings (selection)

Ackroyd, P. London the Biography. Vintage, 2000.

Baccolini, R., & T. Moylan, eds. Dark horizons: Science fiction and the dystopian imagination. Routledge, 2003.

Claeys,G. & L. T. Sargent The Utopia Reader. N. Y. U. P. 2017.

Gordin, M., H.Tilley et al., eds. Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton U. P., 2010.

Lefebvre, H. The Urban Revolution. U. Minnesota P., 2003.

Martinotti, G. The new social morphology of cities. MOST. D.P.S.-16. http://www.unesco.org/most/martinot.htm. 

Miles, M. Art, Space and the city: Public art and urban futures.  Routledge, 2000.

Miles, M.et al. The City Cultures Reader. Routledge, 2000.