Urban Landscape: Multidimensional Analysis, Interdisciplinary Approach, Comparative Perspective (Erasmus)

Syllabus

1. Philosophical approach to urban landscape. Place and space. Strategy and tactics in urban landscape formation (seminar)     Text of Michel de Certeau.

2. Urban landscape on the mental maps. Individual perception of the city (seminar).     Text of Kevin Lynch.

3. Urban semiotics. Symbolic dimension of a city. Urban landscape as a message and palimpsest (seminar).     Texts of Umberto Eco and Ivan Mitin.

4. Anthropology of city space. Urban landscape, formed by people’s activities. Social and national identity, and collective memory, reflected in the space (seminar)     Book by Dolores Hayden, chapter  The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space.

5. City dimension. Structure and architecture of urban space, and activities held there, as the reflection of main political, social and cultural features of the era (seminar).      Text of Walter Benjamin

6. City dimension. Political and social changes, new technologies and their influence on urban landscape. The participants of the urban development: top down and bottom up directions (seminar).     Book by Marjatta Bell and Marjatta Hietala, introduction.

7. City dimension. Immigrants’ activity as a contribution to the urban landscape. New spaces and senses of the city, formed by immigrants. Comparative perspective (seminar and lecture).     Book by Dolores Hayden, chapter Place Memory and Urban Preservation;      Presentation Public Places of Russian Immigrants in Paris in the 1920 –

1930.

8. City dimension. Formation and functioning of green spaces as a result of various political, social and cultural processes. The initiators and participants of green spaces’ development and their target audience. Comparative perspective (seminar).     Book by Peter Clark.

9. Small town dimension. Revitalization with the help of the tourism development and local community increase and reunion. Different strategies of these processes. Comparative perspective (seminar).     Texts of Luda Klusáková and Greg Yudin.

10. District dimension. Cultural heritage of the district of different centuries. Its meaning throughout various periods, and its role in the formation of the contemporary image of the area. Top down and bottom up directions of the activities, connected with cultural heritage (lecture).     Presentation Petrogradskaya Storona of St. Petersburg as Urban Palimpsest.

11. District dimension. Ways of quarter successful development. Comparative perspective (seminar and lecture).      Text of Joan Ganau.      Presentation Petrograd district in St. Petersburg in the beginning of the 20th century: a symbol of modernity.

12. Particular architectural objects from the point of view of semiotics, reflection of the identity, political, social, economic and cultural processes. Comparative perspective (seminar).       Texts of Kinerk Michael D. and Olga Zinovieva.

13. Urban landscape in literature perspective. City space as the way to understand the described era and heroes. Spatial semiotics, expressed in literature. Analysis of the image of St. Petersburg in the prose and poetry of the different periods of time. Formation of new urban textual reality. The influence of this reality on the perception of the city by the inhabitants and tourists (lecture).       Analysis of the article Peterburgskii text russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy [Petersburg Text of Russian Literature] by Vladimir Toporov.       Presentation Petersburg Text of Russian Literature from the 18th to the 21th centuries.

Annotation

The course envisages the analysis of the urban landscape from multiple points of view: anthropological, philosophical, semiotic, literature; and the examination of the urban area on different dimensions (capital city, small town, district, particular public place or architectural objects), situated in distinct regions (Western Europe, Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the United States) during diverse periods of time (from the 18th to the beginning of the 21th century).

This approach allows to apply comparative perspective, aimed on the understanding of the urban landscape in its entirety.