Part I. Close Analysis

II. General Essay Questions:

1. Lived City: Urbanism.
Urbanism, Louis Wirth claims, is a way of life which is characterized by efficiency,
heterogeniety on the one hand, and anonymity, segmentation, as well as superficial and
transitory personal relations (or a shift away from primary relationships to secondary relationships)
on the other.
Do you agree? Use two of the texts we have discussed in class to illustrate your points.

2. Lived City: Spaces of Flows and Chance Encounter.
Choose two short texts or one long text to analyze their treatments of flows and
the spaces of flows. How do the city texts we have read present the rapid flows (of people,
commodities, information, virus, capital, etc.), the spaces (streets, subway station, department
stores, restaurants, hotels, strip bar, concert hall, empty apartment building and homes)
where these flows happen, and the ways people are related to each other?
* Whether you choose one text or two, make sure that you discuss more than
one kind of human relationships in the space of flows.

3. Lived City: People on the Margins
How do the Taipei texts and the Toronto counterparts imagine and present the people
on the margins? What are the similarities and differences in their choices and views of the
'margins'? Are the differences those in nature or in degree? In other words, are
there ways to connect Toronto and Taipei in the issues of laborers, immigrants,
homosexuals, or the homeless? Use at least two texts as examples in your comparison
and contrast of the margins of the two cities.

4. Concept City:

How do urban planners and theorists design or look at urban spaces and city dwellers in order to
construct a city's identity?
Discuss one of the views listed above and use one example of your own choice to support
or critique this view.

5. History: How do postmodern city texts deal with history? By cutting and mixing different "stories"
or various signs of the past? Or by showing an interaction between the past and the present?
Either choose two fictional texts from our class, or one fictional text from class and one spatial text
(a place or an architecture) of your own choice to analyze.

6. Reading city texts: choose one group report or one free-choice journal done by your classmates
to comment on. Please analyze the methods and texts used in this reading of a city,
and then either support it with some of your own examples, or provide another perspective
this report did not consider.