Beginning in January of 2013, several
faculty at UCLA joined to form the Urban Humanities Initiative with the intention
of making it an internationally recognized hub for collaborative urban study
that bridges architecture and the humanities. The UHI 2014-15 project focuses
on the city of Shanghai and the concept of contested spaces of identity. Issues
addressed include spatial and morphological restructuring of the city; forms
and processes of identification; uses of the past and visions of the future;
aesthetics, authenticity, and the social imaginary; and how particular modes of
representation like maps, images, texts, and narratives shape urban identities
and our understanding of them. Following a year’s course of study about the
history, film, literature, architecture, and planning of Shanghai,
mixed-discipline teams traveled to the city to explore and film one of four
sites. Complementing cinematic representations of Shanghai are a series of
densely rendered spatial diagrams and maps that give further dimensionality to
the urban humanists’view of Shanghai in the past, the future, and the now.