Course Description and Aims

This module provides an introductory survey of the history of urban development from the ancient period to the end of the twentieth century. It focuses on the forces that have led to the development of cities in the past, and achieves this through the lens of a multi-disciplinary perspective and the utilisation of various methodologies. Such a standpoint is adopted in order to allow for the exploration of the impacts of matters like politics, economics, culture and identity, art and architecture, intellectual thought, law, transportation, and military technology upon urban society at different times in history, and to recognise how they influenced the design and shape of the built environment, and so city living. Central to the programme is the use of comparative analyses which assist in identifying and contrasting patterns of urban change. As such differences in urban design that became evident in the past will be made clear. Furthermore such an approach helps illuminate and clarify the imprint upon urban space and the urban mind of agents affecting the urban development process, including visions and concepts (built and unbuilt) that have swayed social development. Importantly too in utilising this analytical perspective students are granted opportunities to test hypotheses under the guidance of their teacher about the causes and effects of urban transition, in so doing helping explicitly comprehend the narrative of historical urban development in both factual and conceptual terms.

The course is designed with particular outcome-based learning objectives in mind:

By achieving these objectives students shall collect grades that contribute towards their end of term score. For further details of the how the course grade is given please refer to the section ‘Grading’.

Course Structure

Teaching takes place within two complementary learning situations, these being:

Lectures

The lectures are designed to not only be informative but to allow, where possible, for active student participation. What this means is that once inside the classroom students are not passive learners who merely sit and listen to the teacher talk. Instead lectures will include various exercises to engage students with the subject being presented to them. The goal of such a strategy is to promote learning motivation, to encourage debate, and the development of different thinking and analysis processes.

Tutorials

The tutorials, 4 in total – each 50-60 minutes in length, grant students the chance to discuss the topics introduced in the lectures, and opportunities to help sort out any problems in understanding that the students may have.

To prepare for the tutorials materials are placed onto Blackboard but during the term students might be asked to take responsibility for a small part of a tutorial. This is to be accomplished by giving a short presentation, for instance. The purpose of this exercise is that it will give everyone the chance to grasp part of the course in greater depth, and so will help everyone better prepare for the written assignments. To provoke discourse outside the classroom, and so to ensure student involvement, active learning and where possible deeper learning and thinking, students are encouraged to create their own threads within the course’s Facebook group.

At the start of each tutorial a detailed answer sheet designed by Prof. Morley will be distributed. This will act as a reference point for the class discussions, and shall expand upon many themes raised initially in the lectures. It will also help with work for the assignments.

Potential Problems

Being a student, especially if you’re married, have children and a job, for example, is obviously not easy. Juggling a professional and home life with the demands of a university course can be troublesome at times. Consequently some simple behavioural patterns are advisable. By way of example, be thoroughly organised from the start of the term. Note down the deadlines of any work to be handed in or the dates of any presentations to be given as well as the dates of tutorials you are expected to attend. Moreover given the demands of work and home problems sometimes can occur. If difficulties do arise that will impact upon your studies please contact your Tutor immediately. Your Tutor will endeavour to help you as much as is possible so please do not hesitate to speak with or to email your Tutor should you need help. Importantly, when problems do arise please do not wait until telling your Tutor. Problems when they initially occur can be managed far more easily than ones left to develop for a while.

To ensure that the students’ learning process is as smooth as can be Prof. Morley will distribute handouts at each lecture. Should you miss a class then all these materials can be accessed online, as can a voice recording of the lecture. In addition to support your learning outside of the classroom Prof. Morley has created learning materials related to the lectures which allows for a structured learning environment beyond the lecture hall, and to help buttress all students’ scholarly needs.

e-Learning

To supplement the students’ learning all course materials shall be available online through a developed version of CUHK’s Blackboard system. To access these materials registered students input their CUHK student number and password, and if they so wish, they can download materials. Materials accessible to students include chapters from books, journal papers, photos, virtual reality animation, interactive panoramas of urban environments, maps, internet links, lecture PowerPoints used by Prof. Morley, and voice recordings of the lectures. The use of online resources ensures that if for any reason a student is unable to attend a class due to illness, a business trip or other commitments that individual can still access all materials given out in the lecture, and shall not fall behind in the course. Furthermore texts pertinent to assignment questions can be uploaded by Prof. Morley if there are problems obtaining books or papers from the library. However to support student learning outside of the classroom, and to offer a structured environment beyond the lecture hall, HIST5592 uses a variety of interactive online instructional methods that include:

Accordingly, with the lecture, tutorials and online learning support mechanisms a coherent scholarly environment is provided for, one that has a purposeful architecture to provide for the extension of wisdom both inside and outside the classroom.

Internet Links

For each class a list of useful internet sources will be given. This is to not only allow for an additional source of information, and one of a visual nature, but to allow those students who register for the course and with limited abilities to visit CUHK’s libraries to still have access to materials pertinent to the course as it unfolds each week. Internet links will be available to registered students via the course’s Facebook group.

Course Portfolio

All registered students for HIST5592 will be able to access on Blackboard a portfolio designed by Prof. Morley. The portfolio shall contain:

Core Texts and Journals

The key texts for course HIST5592 are:

Shane Ewan, What is Urban History?  UL HT113.E94 2016
John Reader, Cities  UL HT111. R43 2004
Lewis Mumford, The City in History  UL HT111.M8/ARL HT111.M8

However other texts of relevance to parts of the course are:

Edmund Bacon, The Design of Cities   CC Res NA9050.B22 1974
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation  CC Res HT 111. H345 1998
Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1994   UL HT131.H658 1995
Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped and The City Assembled   CC Res HT111.K63
A.E.J. Morris, History of Urban Form   CC Res /ARL HT166.M59 1993
Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art   CC Res NA970.O47 1986
Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500-1800   CC Res/UL HT131.D4

For primary sources relating to aspects of the course tied to modern cities (between about 1700 and 1900), please refer to
http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/homepage.htm.

Students will be expected to make use of other materials listed within this document as the course unfolds to prepare for both classes and assignments. At the same time many journals will be of use to this preparation process. In particular publications such as Urban History, Social History, Town Planning Review, Planning Perspectives, Journal of Urban History, The Economic History Review, Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Social Medicine will have relevance to particular lectures and assignment questions.

Week 1. Introduction Class: The First Cities (Friday, September 8th 2017)

Welcome!

In this opening session a synopsis of the course and the subject of Urban History shall be put forward.

The lecture will also discuss what the first cities were like. It will analyse how the first urban societies differed from rural societies. It will also introduce the physical expressions that new forms of urban-based social organisation took.

Week 2. Greeks and Romans (Friday, September 15th 2017)

What were Greek and Roman cities like? Did they share similar features? Did they contrast with each other in any ways? How did Greek and Roman cities express the concept of power – power of the people, religion, authority?

Week 3. The Medieval Era, Cathedrals and Urban Places (Friday, September 22nd 2017)

What were the main characteristics of the Medieval City? What architecture dominated towns and cities at that time? Why? Were all European Medieval Cities alike? What was housing like at that time? What were the main factors in controlling its form?

Week 4. The Renaissance and Baroque City: Humanism to Autocracy (Friday, September 29th 2017)

How did the Renaissance conceptualise the ideal city? What were the areas of Renaissance urban planning, its design components and aesthetic considerations? What cultural factors affected the Renaissance concept of planning? How did military developments affect urban design? What were the principles on which the 16th century Popes, such as Pope Sixtus V, re-planned Rome, or aristocratic leaders redesigned their palaces? In what ways were their approaches innovative? Why do you think their ideas were copied and continued elsewhere in Europe during the next 300 years?

Week 5. The London Terraced House and Square (Friday, October 6th 2017)

What were the main characteristics of the London terraced house? How were residential areas laid out from 1660 until the 19th century? How did this form an Italianisation of London? Why do you think the form of terraced housing changed so little in over 200 years? What led to its abandonment? Were other British cities developed in the same way as London? Did the ideas practised in London also have an effect in the British Empire?

Week 6. Coping with Change (i) Coketowns: Dirt, Disease, Death, Deprivation (Friday, October 13th 2017)

Was Charles Dickens’ fictional industrial town Coketown true of living conditions in the early-1800s in Europe? What problems were industrial settlements experiencing regardless of their location (including ones in the US)? How were these towns contributing (or not) to national economic development? How did the rich and how did the poor live? What impact did people like Friedrich Engels, a first-hand observer of modern urbanisation, have? How did Britain control its environmental problems, and how did this affect its colonies?

Week 7. Coping with Change (ii) London and Paris in the mid-19th Century (Friday, October 20th 2017)

What were the principle difference between the growth of Paris and London in the 19th century? How do you explain these differences? Who were the main actors in the transformations that took place? Was Paris designed to be a work of art or did the urban renewal agenda incorporate other factors? Did Paris’ development affect London, and if so how and why?

Week 8. NO CLASS: PROF. MORLEY AT CONFERENCE! (Friday, October 27th 2017)

Week 9. The City Beautiful: The North American City (Friday, November 3rd 2017)

How did the rapid urbanisation of the US from the late-1800s affect American thinking about the city? What is the relationship between architects and the American City by about 1900? What was the nature of the City Beautiful Movement? What impact did it have? Why did the City Beautiful, a strictly American concept, spread to places like Manila, Guangzhou and Nanjing? How did the City Beautiful cross cultural borders? Why did the City Beautiful Movement die?

Week 10. Architects and Utopia: New Directions to National Development (Friday, November 10th 2017)

What was the distinctive contribution of Raymond Unwin, Tony Garnier, and Le Corbusier to urban development in the 20th century? What were the similarities between the approaches the adopted? What were the differences? How effective do you think each was in establishing a new model of urban development? How optimistic were they? Why did idealistic European ideas have an influence in places like India by the 1950s? Do these ideas have any historical comparisons with ideal cities from the Renaissance?

Week 11. Colonial and Post-Colonial Urban Statements: New Delhi and Canberra (Friday, November 17th 2017)

How did the design and plan of environments such as New Delhi and Canberra express sentiments relating to colonialism? What forms did these environments have, and how did they use historicism to establish modern city environments? In the case of Canberra, how did politics affect the design of the city? Is Canberra today the product of urban planning or government attitudes? In what ways was the competition to design Canberra an international scandal, and how did this influence the selection of prize winners? Additionally, did the Indian wish to free itself from colonialism lead to new city types or a re-use of British ideas?

Week 12. City Faces (i). Identities and Nationalism: Antoni Gaudi and Barcelona (Friday, November 24th 2017)

How and why did Barcelona develop in the way it did from the mid-1800s? What factors affected its development from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early-1900s? What role did Antoni Gaudi play in this process? And how did his identity as a Catalan affect his architectural work? How is Gaudi’s work now perceived given his image at the centre of Barcelona’s tourist industry, the local cultural renaissance, and the fall of Franco?

Week 13. City Faces (ii). Skyscrapers and their Meanings (Friday, December 1st 2017)

What were the origins of high-rise construction? Where were the earliest examples of high-rise offices and housing to be found, and what form did they take? Why did high-rise housing come to be seen as an important means of dealing with housing provision after the Second World War? What led to its eventual abandonment in Britain but its continued use in other countries? What is the significance of high-rise construction today in Asia? Why are the largest buildings in the world found in countries like Taiwan, Malaysia and the UAE? What symbolic messages/readings lie within tall buildings and why do they have great meaning to particular societies as they evolve?

To supplement the lecture documentary work Prof. Morley has undertaken with The Discovery Channel and Voom! will be utilised.

Grading

Students shall be given a term grade based on:

However always remember: speak with Prof. Morley should you have any questions about how your term grade is composed, or how your work shall be graded. We are happy to assist you!

Assignment Assistance

Juggling the demands of an academic course with other requirements is never easy. Doing so in a language such as English, maybe a second or a third language, can often compound this situation. Frequently it can lead to much anxiety. Therefore to provide as much assistance as possible Prof. Morley at the end of lectures shall provide time to speak one-to-one about anything to do with the course, e.g. assignments, and to answer any questions relating to matters raised by the lecture. Additionally he will ask as assignment deadlines approach for assignment plans to be created so that they can be checked to ensure work is on ‘the right track’. Plus, as noted earlier, academic writing files to assist students about the writing process are provided on Blackboard, as are assignment planning documents. Prof. Morley, as a former language teacher who has worked in Spain, France and Taiwan, is happy though to discuss any aspect of the writing process with you if you require any other kind of help.

Assignment Preparation Sheets

As noted previously students will be asked during the term to formally submit written work. For HIST5592 students submit two essays: a short paper assignment, and the take-home examination. For each piece of work a list of questions shall be given many weeks ahead of the hand-in date along with guidelines for this particular written task. Students then answer one question from the list distributed by Prof. Morley.

As previously mentioned all students will have access to assignment planning documents immediately after the assignment question sheet is handed out. The planning sheets offer assistance in appreciating the true meaning of the question, the context of the subject involved, grasping which reading materials are most useful to composing the assignment, and the best way to then use source materials.

Ground Rules and Academic Honesty

It is important that students registering for HIST5592 attend classes and arrive prepared. This includes endeavouring to turn up on time, having paper on which to record lecture notes, listening attentively to the teacher and, where possible, joining in any teacher-led discussions. To assist students with lectures, tutorials and assignment preparation, edited lecture notes based on the lecture PowerPoint will be handed out at the start of each lecture session, as will copies of key texts or lecture worksheets designed by Prof. Morley. But in order for all classroom situations to work effectively certain rules need to be established. Regulations relating to the classroom teaching of HIST5592 include:

Tutorial Dates and Themes

As part of your undertaking of HIST5592 you are required to attend four tutorials. These shall take place immediately after the lecture. Each tutorial offers an opportunity to discuss, evaluate and note aspects of the urban past raised within the lectures so as to clarify and elucidate your knowledge of cities and their development. Where possible particular skill-building activities will be introduced. Provisionally, the following dates and topics are set for the tutorials:

            1. Friday, September 22^nd 2017 – Week 3 – Introduction, and city development debate.
            2. Friday, October 13^th – Week 6 – Comparing pre-industrial cities, map reading.
            3. Friday, November 10^th – Week 10 – Cities/buildings, identity, and nationhood.
            4. Friday, December 1^st – Week 13 – Cities, national development, and urban history.

Please note: For tutorials 2 and 3 the class may be split into smaller groups, i.e. groups A, and B, depending on the number of registered students for the course.

Fieldtrip

It is anticipated that a short fieldtrip shall take place before the end of the course.

The fieldtrip is composed so as to offer a valuable opportunity to see the theory of urban development and culture in practice, and to see urban transition and design processes ‘in action’.

The fieldtrip shall go to Central District, Hong Kong. The visit is designed to tie in with the lectures and tutorials on 19th century environments, skyscrapers, and the meaning of architectural structures. The visit will afford the chance to see and understand the meaning of the historic and contemporary metropolis to the development of Hong Kong.

A time will be arranged that is most appropriate to everyone for this fieldtrip. However, in light of differing time constraints placed upon students it may not be possible to find an ideal fieldtrip date for everyone.

To avoid clashes with Saturday classes the fieldtrip will take place on a Sunday.

A phone/tablet App will be available to students attending the field trip informing them of urban developments in Hong Kong. The App includes old photos, maps, and historical data related to the past and present condition of Hong Kong’s built environment.

请注意大学有关学术著作诚信的政策和规则，及适用于犯规事例的纪律指引和程序。详情可浏览此处。

学生递交作业时，必须连同已签署的声明一并提交，表示他们知道有关政策、规则、指引及程序。

• 如属小组习作，则所有组员均须签署声明；所有组员 (不论有否签署声明及不论有否直接或间接撰写有问题的内容) 均须负上集体责任及受到惩处。
• 如作业以电脑制作、内容以文字为主，并经由大学「维诚」系统 (VeriGuide) 提交者，学生将作业的电子档案上载到系统后，便会获得收据，收据上已列明有关声明。
• 学生充分知悉到他们的作业可能会被人工智能内容检测软件审查，以确定其原创性。
• 学生充分知悉科目中采用人工智能工具的做法。在经允许下使用某些人工智能工具的情况下，学生已按照科目老师的指示明确注明出处和引文。

未有夹附签署妥当的声明的作业，老师将不予批阅。

学生只须提交作业的最终版本。

学生将作业或作业的一部份用于超过一个用途 (例如：同时符合两科的要求) 而没有作出声明会被视为未有声明重复使用作业。 学生重复使用其著作的措辞或某一、二句句子很常见，并可以接受，惟重复使用全部内容则构成问题。在任何情况下，须先获得相关老师同意方可提交作业。

由大学职员/老师制作的教学材料，包括课堂笔记、作业及考试题目等，其版权属香港中文大学拥有；学生可从大学采用的网上教学系统 (例如Blackboard) 下载由大学职员/老师制作的教学材料供其学习使用；惟未经相关职员/老师事先同意下，不得分发/分享/复制这些材料予第三者。