Lecture Outline: Introduction

City Life (SOCI 3010/1999)

Dr. Kate Anderson

E-mail: through Blackboard
Office: School of Liberal Arts and Sciences ((LRC 5th Floor, North; A114 Lake)

The Orientation of the Course

Living in urban space is a major social influence (North America: 79% now live in cities)
Differences in structure and life: rural vs. urban

Q: How does living in URBAN space shape us?

Objective: Theorizing space rather than simply using it
Seeing how our built environments are expressions of how a society thinks (embody ways of thinking and
being)
The Metropolis vs. the Megalopolis
Variations in street structure

Examining How Space Speaks

E.g. Door, Chair, Desk, Window
Raising the Question
How do you have to think to design these objects (build these things, as opposed to other things, in this
way)? What does the built environment tell us about what our culture values, expects, believes? What does
it make normal?

Course Methodology
Theorizing City Life:
o Observation
o Questioning
o Imagining new possibilities

Raising Questions of Space

o What is Present / Absent?
o What / who is normalized?
o What is valued?
o What is our Ideal and why?
o How does what we see reveal values, expectations? What does it orient us to?

Forms of Space set Parameters for Living

e.g. Concentrated City Forms vs. Dispersed City Forms (the Metropolis vs. the Megalopolis)
-- differences in daily life (viz. commute times, how we move the body, who we see regularly, etc.)

In-class example: Examining the Space of the Classroom

Making the Link: Spatial Characteristics and how they speak (show ways of thinking and acting)

Course Resources:
Course Outline (available online)
Reading Schedule (will be posted online)
Course readings (will be posted online)
 Lecture Outlines (posted weekly)

Next Week:
Witold Rybczynski, The Measure of a Town
Florence Dupont, Daily Life in Ancient Rome
Topics: Reading the City as an Artifact
The Ancient City Form