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Publications

Urban Humanities: Potential of the Humanities and the Megacity

Beginning in January of 2013, several faculty at UCLA joined to form the Urban Humanities Initiative with the intention of making it an internationally recognized hub for collaborative urban study that bridges architecture and the humanities. The UHI 2014-15 project focuses on the city of Shanghai and the concept of contested spaces of identity. Issues addressed include spatial and morphological restructuring of the city; forms and processes of identification; uses of the past and visions of the future; aesthetics, authenticity, and the social imaginary; and how particular modes of representation like maps, images, texts, and narratives shape urban identities and our understanding of them. Following a year’s course of study about the history, film, literature, architecture, and planning of Shanghai, mixed-discipline teams traveled to the city to explore and film one of four sites. Complementing cinematic representations of Shanghai are a series of densely rendered spatial diagrams and maps that give further dimensionality to the urban humanists’view of Shanghai in the past, the future, and the now.