The Chinese City: From Imperial Capital to Global Metropolis

Fabio Lanza
THURSDAYS 9:00 a.m. until noon
October 3 until December 12, 2013
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The Chinese City: From Imperial Capital to Global Metropolis

Fall 2013
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THURSDAYS
9:00 a.m. until noon
October 3 until December 12, 2013

Location: 

Main Campus

Tuition: 

$195.00

This course analyzes the evolution of Chinese urban space to show how both Chinese people and outsiders viewed the evolving form of the city as the symbol of China’s progress, its position in the world, and its internal social dynamics. From the walls of the Forbidden City to the Western buildings of Shanghai, from the massive squares and the drab structures of communism to the incredible expansion in the last thirty years, we will investigate the shifting meanings of architecture and city life. We will look at how such notions as cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and scientific rationality developed in and around the city. To accomplish this, we will introduce different and less canonical historical sources, including movies, memoirs, photographs, and art objects.
 

Required Reading: 

Hung, Wu. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. University of Chicago Press, 2005. ISBN: 0226360792.

 

Meyer, Michael. The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. Walker & Co., 2009. ISBN: 0802717500.

 

Meet Your Professor

Associate Professor
Department of History, Department of East Asian Studies

Fabio Lanza is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History in the departments of History and East Asian Studies. He is the author of Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia, 2010) and coeditor of Decentering Cold War History: Local and Global Change (Routledge, 2012).  He received his PhD from Columbia University and was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia and at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University.  

Location

Poetry Center
Dorothy Rubel Room
1508 E Helen
Tucson, AZ 85721
United States
Located on the SE corner of Helen Street and Vine Avenue, one block north of Speedway and three blocks west of Campbell Ave.

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