French in the City, and the City in France: Urban Studies track

This course provides students with an active, place-based perspective on how culture and creativity are used in Lille to overcome urban decline. The City of Lille was named Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2004, and uses a mix of culture based urban regeneration policies to remake itself into a vibrant urban hub at the crossroads of northern Europe. Students will learn the policy context for Lille’s creative regeneration practices, observe the impact of these policies through site visits and interviews, and evaluate whether Lille’s policy mix can be translated and transferred to other urban contexts. Key skill-building includes evaluation analysis, field research, and comparative policy analysis.

Course Goals

1. To provide direct experience with the practice of cultural regeneration for local development in Lille.
2. To provide students with the opportunity to consider how governance arrangements and planning frameworks are at once local and global and can bisect to influence neighborhood development.
3. To provide an advanced overview of cultural regeneration strategies in the European Union, United Kingdom, and United States.
4. To examine neoliberalization as a contingent yet prevailing operating context that can create inequitable outcomes within and between urban neighborhoods.

This course will be taught by a local faculty member in Lille, France. 

This course will provide students with an overview of the cultural heritage and museums of Lille's region, settled in the heart of Europe, at the crossroads of London, Paris and Brussels, close to Amsterdam. Students will have course sessions in various museums and sites as mentioned below. Topics to be covered will normally include: Architecture: guided tours of Lille to discover the typical Flemish architecture and the industrial architecture; visit to the Villa Cavrois, a modern museum in an art-deco home Medieval history and architecture: visit to Hospice Comtesse Museum, town museum of Lille housed in a former hospital founded in 1237 by Jeanne, Countess of Flanders. It focuses on the commercial and artistic and scientific history of Lille, and the collection features 17th and 18th century paintings and decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, tapestries) Fine arts: including a visit of the fine arts museum in Lille, one of the premier museums in France, which houses numerous European paintings across periods, a collection of antiquities, a medieval and Renaissance collection, 17th and 18th-century ceramics, 19th-century French sculptures and 18th-century scale models Modern art: visit to LaM (Lille Metropole Museum of Modern Art), contemporary art and art brut - an important museum for 20th and 21st century art in the north of Europe, including three permanent collections: modern art (Modigliani, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Van Dongen ¿), contemporary art (Deacon, Soulages, Allan McCollum, Dennis Oppenheim¿), outsider art (Aloise Corbaz, Adolf Wolfli, Henry Darger¿) and a unique outdoor sculpture park Visit to the Louvre-Lens, the only regional branch of the Louvre in France, including art works from the Louvre Paris collection displayed in a contemporary building of glass and light created by SANAA, world-famous Japanese architects, in harmony with the location, an historical mining site La Piscine, in Roubaix, one of the most celebrated museums in France outside of Paris, in a former Art Deco swimming-pool Note: students will travel to these museums on foot or by public transportation and will be guided there by staff of the Universite Catholique de Lille. Class hours may vary according to visited sites.