Elective

CLIT7032 Reading the City: Mapping, Narrative, and Urban Space

This course explores how cities can be read, interpreted, and represented through space. Rather than treating urban environments as fixed or purely functional, the course introduces students to a range of approaches for understanding how space is produced, experienced, and contested in everyday life.

Drawing on ideas from architecture, urban theory, literature, and film, the course invites students to examine how people perceive, navigate, and assign meaning to the environments they inhabit. Students will experiment with different ways of recording and mapping urban conditions, using mapping not as a neutral technical tool but as a form of inquiry, storytelling, and critique.

Emphasis is placed on non-standard and exploratory forms of mapping that foreground lived experience, informal practices, and moments of spatial tension. These may include in-between spaces, sites of encounter or conflict, temporary occupations, and everyday routines that often escape official plans or conventional representations. Through field observation, archival research, and creative documentation, students will develop their own methods for analysing specific aspects of the urban fabric.

The course encourages students to work across media—such as drawing, mapping, photography, film, and writing—to construct spatial narratives and visual arguments about urban life. While the course may engage with a range of theoretical perspectives on space, power, and everyday practice, its focus is on how these ideas can be activated through observation, representation, and critical making.

Projects will culminate in visual, spatial, or narrative works that articulate a critical position on the city. While Hong Kong may serve as a primary site of investigation, the methods and approaches developed in the course are intended to be transferable to other urban contexts.

Assessment: 100% coursework