- 14 Mar, 2021
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the city and the environment
In a three to four page essay, answer the following prompt:
“In making the city,” Robert Park writes, “(humanity) has remade (itself).” Develop at least one way in which humans made their cities and remade themselves in the one hundred years or so before 1900 in Western Europe and the United States. As you develop your theme, your paper should focus on one specific reading from the first section of the class (weeks one through four), developing an argument or arguments from the reading. You should also develop some of the reading’s broader implications, at the same time that you engage with at least one other reading from the syllabus. You may bring in outside readings, but that is not necessary.
Possible topics to explore:
The body and health
Individualism and circulation
The city and the environment
The city and the countryside
Urban infrastructures
Creative destruction
A myth or myths of modernity
Consumerism and spectacle
The city as a “unity of disunity”
Urban poverty and mass inequity
The city and protest
Empirical content:
The rise of Chicago and the transformation of its hinterlands
The changes in infrastructure and consumption in the late 19th century
Mass transformations in Haussman’s Paris
Housing, squatting, and poverty