This is a 15-credit core module, which part-time students take in the 2nd year of their studies. 

It invites students to engage with the city as an imaginary and discursive entity as well as a place where things happen. It aims to diversify the perspectives we bring to the city beyond the formal and the technocratic, which had dominated city planning and urban studies. It explores different aesthetics, analysing texts, paintings, photographs and popular media such as songs and newspapers, it is also interested in the way these foster cultural collectives and a sens eof belonging, which may be diffuse, but can be powerful. It asks, therefore, what lies behind the gesture or the invocation towards totality - 'Paris'! - or towards essence. And it thinks about where and when these claims or designations emerge. Through these questions and approaches, it aims to explore the city as a political actor - not through its demographic and financial assets - be through its capacity to foster new subjectivities and new ways of being in close, often interdependent, proximity.