“In making the city,” Robert Park writes, “(humanity) has remade (itself).” Develop at least one
way in which humans made their cities and remade themselves in the one hundred years or so
before 1900 in Western Europe and the United States. As you develop your theme, your paper
should focus on one specific reading from the first section of the class (weeks one through four),
developing an argument or arguments from the reading. You should also develop some of the
reading’s broader implications, at the same time that you engage with at least one other reading
from the syllabus. You may bring in outside readings, but that is not necessary.
Possible topics to explore:
The body and health
Individualism and circulation
The city and the environment
The city and the countryside
Urban infrastructures
Creative destruction
A myth or myths of modernity
Consumerism and spectacle
The city as a “unity of disunity”; the maelstrom of modernity
Urban poverty and mass inequity
The city and protest
Sample Solution