Please note that this module was available
from 2007 to 2009, but has since been
withdrawn and is no longer available.

---

Tutor: Dr Stephane van Damme

This undergraduate first-year and second-year option module explores the cultural history of emergent world cities during two centuries. Since the Eighteenth-Century, metropolises have become the centre of a new conception of urban identity passing from the age of national capital cities to World cities. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, this module examines a theme that has emerged as central in recent study of modern urban history: the metropolitan culture. From the history of cultural capital in Europe to the analysis of global-city, the module encourages students to think beyond national and to question the cultural centrality of metropolis. The global-city is characterized by a new idea of the urban territory; the shaping of a metropolitan society; the centralization of intellectual activity and cultural facilities (theatres, museums, libraries, university, etc). Throughout the module, attention will be paid to historiographical debates within urban history. Though the case studies of Paris, London and New York, the module addresses the challenge of globalisation in its first phase of emergence.