Cities and Cultures is a thematic cluster structured around history, art history, literature, film and languages. If you take this theme, you will be guided in making links between the disciplinary paths on offer (art, history, film, literature, languages) through the lens of cities and their historical development. In this way, you will learn how urban environments have shaped various aspects of Western culture throughout history, including painting, sculpture, literature, cinema, and new media, as well as the languages spoken in them.
The Cities and Cultures introductory theme course focuses on urban centres at various points in history, beginning with early modern European cities such as Florence and Golden Age Amsterdam. The development of cities will be studied historically, paying special attention to the role of particular cities in intellectual, economic and industrial revolutions, as well as to their role in colonisation and trade. We also will investigate how humans have given form to and been formed by their life together in society and through culture, taking into consideration insights from the humanities as well as the sciences and social sciences, in order to better understand how cities have been important sites of change in virtually all areas of human endeavour.
This thematic course also addresses problems that have grown up with cities over the course of their history and looks forward to possible directions for urban life in the future. This will include a discussion of the city's many ‘others' whom it has variously nourished, subjected and rejected, and by whom it has been threatened and sometimes destroyed. Likewise, the city has relied on individuals and groups who have often acted as subversive forces, such as artists, political and religious radicals, immigrants, the bourgeoisie, and the economically marginalised. And urban centres have had a complex and dynamic relationship with external forces, including surrounding land and water and their related agrarian and maritime communities; external political competitors; and regional/global economic, social and cultural forces. These relationships have helped to define urban life, and the cultures and societies through which they emerged and that they sustained.
