TEACHING

GE3106 | Documentary & Everyday Urban Life

City planners and architects are not the only people who create the urban landscape. The city is also transformed by the everyday ways people use the city. People like urban recyclers, dishwashers, taxi drivers, cooks, dockworkers, karaoke singers, fishermen, domestic ‘helpers’, bankers, and bartenders, also play a part in how we understand the city and how it works. In this course, students will learn about often-invisible everyday urban processes and practices that make up life in the city through documentary video, creative arts, anthropology, and urban studies.

We are often lost in the digital world of cell phones and laptops, and we forget there is a fascinating real world all around us. This course aims to deepen students’ awareness of the social, political and cultural processes of the city’s everyday life through an interdisciplinary approach. Students will develop critical thinking and research skills, creating interactive digital projects in various neighbourhoods of Hong Kong, connecting analysis with daily life experiences.