Space and Politics in Modernity

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  
• Tutor: Professor Leslie Topp

This module will explore the theoretical, historical and embodied interconnections between space and politics from 1900 to the present. The confidence in the power of spatial transformation to transform society was one of the hallmarks of modernist thinking the early twentieth century.

That confidence had deep roots in the pre-First World War period and resonated through the rest of the century, inspiring both resistance and attempts to rethink and renew how political ends could be achieved by spatial means. Politicised design was a feature of socialist and fascist states and was bound up with the colonial and postcolonial histories of the modern world. It manifested itself in actual spaces ranging from new towns to small-scale housing experiments, from medical and educational complexes to monumental public spaces. The 1960s saw a radical critique of master planning and theorisation of space by Henri Lefebvre and others that has been influential ever since.

The scholarship on twentieth-century space and politics has expanded rapidly in the last two decades; this module will base itself on this rich body of literature (and some particularly important older texts), while also giving you the tools to make an original contribution by examining specific instances of the interaction of politics and space. We will begin with a consideration of methods and critical theory as they relate to the analysis of politics and culture generally, as well as to politics and space more specifically. We will then move through time from 1900 to the present, exploring a range of current approaches to four periods (1900-1918, 1919-1945, 1946-1970, and 1970-2015).

These general discussions, based on assigned readings, will alternate with the examination of particular examples and primary sources relating to four case studies:

• Nation and design in Central Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century
• The politicisation of space in Weimar and Nazi Germany
• Post-war British welfare state and space
• Public space in an era of globalisation and spatial flows

Students on this option are not required to have studied the history of architecture before. It will appeal to all those interested in the connections between politics, the arts and the modern urban environment.