Lecturer: Ulrich Schumann

This course offers an introduction to the broad phenomenon of European culture by focusing on its most complex artefact: the city. Through some of its most illustrative examples, the successful model of "the European City" will be discussed and its characteristics and role in the evolution of European culture highlighted.

Correspondingly, the principal guideline will be cultural complexity. Here, the city will not be reduced to one of its major facets – f.e. technical product, administrative unit, work of art, symbol of its time, expression of anonymous history, mirror of abstract ideas – but regarded as a synthesis: a human artefact able to blend the most diverse interests into a perceptible form.