What is a city? And what is a truly great city? Or a modern one? Or a livable or spectacular one? In our own age of massive global urbanization, in which cities compete to be great, modern, livable and spectacular, these questions have never mattered more. In this course, we discover some origins of the modern, global metropolis in two leading European capitals of the 17th-19th centuries. This was an era of urban transformations so staggering that they changed the lives of the people who underwent them. Transformation was most visible in architecture, but was also taking place through infrastructure(roads, sewers, parks, railroads, etc.) and institutions (politics, economics, learned societies, etc.). In other words, this is a course about the making of “urban culture.”

Meeting Times: TR 9:00 – 10:20 AM    
Location: Art 217