Analyzing & Exploring the City: Dublin

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the physical, socio-economic, political and cultural development of Dublin through space and time. Before students explore the city chronologically, they will examine ancient Ireland's globality in terms of its educational and religious influences, particularly on mainland Europe. Then, starting from the 1Oth C, students will re-trace the Viking city through to the city's current form that is characterized by urban sprawl, multiculturalism and its connection to Europe and the global economy. Much of the first half of the course will explore the creation of the colonial city (Georgian Dublin) and, following independence from Britain, the creation of the postcolonial city. Each of these phases in the city's morphology can be witnessed / read through as an examination of the city's architecture, nomenclature, museums, art and in relation to the post-colonial city, oral histories, which requires an interdisciplinary tool-kit for city exploration and analysis. The second section of the course will explore the policies that fostered the rapid speed at which Dublin grew from being a sparsely populated, non-industrial and disconnected urban space in the 1970s to a post-industrial / post-modern highly populated dense plural space in the 1990s and students will investigate the relationship between these policies and the devastating recession of the 2000s.

The course is cross listed as SOC345DUB.