Course Description

This course looks at the production and uses of urban space through street life and public sociability. Analyzing spatial relations in European and American cities, we will explore how ordinary people in the past and present experienced everyday life and how contests over urban space revealed power relations and social identities of gender, class, and race/ethnicity. Beginning in the early modern era, we’ll be looking at commonplace street activities such as walking, parading, performance, peddling, and slumming. We’ll also explore the evolving cultures of popular urban spaces like parks, cafes, markets, shrines, and public squares. For last three weeks of the course, we will consider the impact of tourism on urban life in cities from Venice to Las Vegas.

Throughout the semester, we will compare historical and contemporary uses of urban space, applying our historical reading of the city to the present day. Along the way, there will be fieldwork in Venice, using the city as a laboratory for our assignments. Students will also investigate, discuss, and write about the uses of urban space in their home countries.

Course Requirements:
Attendance and active participation in discussion and class activities are essential to this class (20% of your grade). There are three short written assignments (1-2 pages) related to field work at different sites in Venice--parks and campi, cafes, markets, etc. (10% each). For a final project, students will write an 8-page research paper analyzing the evolution of a specific urban space or the impact of tourism on a city in your home country or region (40%). There will also be a required oral presentation of your final project at the end of the semester (10%).

Learning Outcomes:
• Gain a familiarity with the geographical concepts of place/space and some of the theories of how urban space is produced and reproduced.
• Understand the uses of different kinds of urban spaces as they evolved over time under different economic, political, and social contexts.
• Be able to analyze how power relations around class, race, and gender shaped contests over urban space.
• Develop good reading, comprehension, and speaking skills in English to enable the effective communication of ideas.
• Become comfortable visiting local sites, observing social behavior, and speaking with locals and visitors to better understand the uses of urban space in Venice.

Selected Readings:
A complete list of readings will be available on the e-learning platform, but here are some examples:

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2011).

Filippo de Vivo, “Walking in Sixteenth Century Venice: Mobilizing the Early Modern City,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 19:1 (2016).

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2001).

Susan Davis, “Making Night Hideous: Christmas Revelry and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” American Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1982).

W. Scott Haines, “The Priest of the Proletarians: Parisian Café Owners and the Working Class, 1820-1914,” International Labor and Working Class History 45 (Spring 1994).

Jason Wood, ed., The Amusement Park: History, Culture and the Heritage of Pleasure (Routledge, 2017).

Fabian Frenzel, Slumming It: The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Robert C. Davis and Garry Marvin, Venice: The Tourist Maze (University of California Press, 2004).