Description
CROWDS AND POWER
Variously referred to as the population, the masses, or the multitude, ?The crowd? has come to signify an increasingly central question for design, urbanism, and politics. For architects, this almost metaphysical category of social life has been ?an inexhaustible source of inspiration and guilt,? as Rem Koolhaas put it. In fact, the crowd has been a persistent preoccupation for a host of intellectual fields such as literature, sociology, human geography, public health, and political philosophy. In this course we will weave the interdisciplinary history of thinking around the concept of the crowd through a series of contemporary case studies: Urbanism, Elections, Immigration, and Protest. Taking Elias Canetti?s notion of Crowds and Power as a starting point, this course will provide a critical introduction to crowd theory and its impact on our understanding of mass media, mass culture, and modern life.