City and Country (Current Version)
Thanks to everyone who made suggestion about my proposed syllabus. I found them all helpful. Yes, Nature's Metropolis made it in (with three recommendations, how could I resist?). However, I have to thank Alan Baumler for mentioning Pommeranz--it was a book that I had read and enjoyed years ago.Anyway, here is how the readings stand now. I added sections relevant to migration and urban interaction. I expect to make changes in the future, and will keep an updated syllabus somewhere on the sidebar.
The City from Tradition to Modernity
- Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950
- Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City
- Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (film)
- Kenneth Pommeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1852-1937
- Jean Giono, Harvest (aka Second Harvest)
- Marc Bloch, French Rural Society
- Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
- Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations about the Americas before Columbus
- David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany
- Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles
- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
- Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon
- Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of Social Environment
- Ann Whitson Spirn, The Language of Landscape
- Renzo Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze
- Denis Cosgrove, Social Transformation and the Symbolic Landscape
- William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
- Jan De Vries, European Urbanization
- Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life
- Shri 420 (film)
- J.R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World
- Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution
- Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650
- Emile Zola, La Bête Humaine
- Paula Robert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857
- Robert Davidson, “Spaces of Immigration ‘Prevention’: Interdiction and the Non-Place”, Diacritics (2003)
- Marc Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815-2000
- Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective
- George Orwell, Road to Wiggan Pier
- Maiken Umbach and Bernd Huppauf, Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment
- Michael J. Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic Revival
- Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature
- Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul
- George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers
- Sunil Kumar, The Present in Delhi’s Pasts
- Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender
- David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital
- Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957
- Andreas Faludi, Making the European Spatial Development Perspective
- Secondary Reading: none
posted by Nathanael @ 10:51 AM
7 Comments:
Have you read Gregg's State of Nature? I'm not sure it's the kind of book you are looking for there. It's good - but really an institutional history that isn't representative of the larger conservation and preservation movement in the US. (Gregg is the advisor on my Ecology prelim field). A nice synthesis book is Donald Worster's Nature's Economy.
I asked one of my professors who is working on the Paris Heat Wave right now about what he suggested for risk and European cities and he mentioned The Resilient City and something by Mike Davis, like Dead Cities or Planet of Slums. He was also wondering if you are familiar with Laird Boswell here at the UW?
Mitman's book came up when I was more committed to discussing the evolution of environmental movements into the Green party. It fits in nicely with nature preservation in Imperial Germany, particularly Denkmalpflege and Landschaftsschutz (the two considered as a pair) as preserving organic balance. Right now, it is just a dormant gene: I'm leaving it in, knowing that I'll remove it later. Planet of Slums is something I have considered for a while, and may change my mind on.
Laird Boswell: had some brief correspondence with him; he does so good work on citizenship in Alsace after 1918.
Of course, I must now deploy the famous joke:
Read it? I haven't even assigned it yet!"
Not to belabor this issue, but I am not looking entirely for synthetic works. Indeed, I've deliberately preferred monographs over synthesis and collections because of the personal commitment that they engender. That's more of an issue of taste, and not everyone would choose to expose students more to raw works.
The two books that come to mind on environmental history are Mark Elvin's Retreat of the Elephants and Conrad Totman's Green Archipelago.
(more later)
On cities, Ted Bestor's Neighborhood Tokyo and Jacques Gernet's Daily Life in China, on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion.
By the way, how do you feel about auditors?
I really like the choice of La Bete Humaine; I don't think it exists in a clasroom assignable form but Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor, which I only know from reviews read a few years ago, I think expands on the idea of the railroad as an extension of the city into and across rural space.
A novel I really enjoyed, and which might go with "the fate of the village" is Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina. During the long span of time it covers - from Ottoman rule to World War I - the village gets reoriented as the transport routes move from road to railroad.
On the making of borders, Siam Mapped is very good, taking the development of Thailand's borders and the idea of a nation as a spatial entity from pre-modern to modern times.
It's pretty short, but I liked this David Runciman review in the LRB about states, representation, and, sort of incidentally, space.
Finally, and this looks perhaps too contemporary for your syllabus, but Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis is a structural/spatial analysis of the development of postwar Detroit from Word War II to the 1967 riots. It was one of the books that came to mind when I was reading about last year's Paris riots.
Post a Comment
<< Home