Course description
While in Italy, you will often find street signs pointing to the “Centro storico” — the historic district of the city or town. But what is a “historic district,” exactly? When did one part of a town, of a monument or a house, become “historical” — and why? Designed for the specialization track on “Cities and Global Change,” the course investigates the meaning and genealogy of this peculiar concept, along with related ones such as “cultural patrimony” and “cultural heritage.” One objective of this course is to historicize these concepts as attempts to respond to a set of phenomena — such as urbanization, industrialization, rationalization, and the advent of mass tourism — that we often subsume under the periodizing rubrics of “modernization” or “globalization.”
A second objective of this course concerns the fundamental paradox of the “historic center”: conceived as a way to protect and preserve the historical uniqueness of a city from the forces of global modernization, the historic center is not only a modern invention, but also a radical re-zoning, transformation and reconversion of parts of a city from traditional (often civic) use to gentrified or touristic areas and to the final “museumification” of the city
— what Mary McCarthy called, in reference to Florence and Venice, a “Disneyfication” of places — in which uniqueness gives way to what Rem Koolhas once called “the global generic city.”
Besides the city of Venice itself, the documents we will analyze and discuss throughout the semester include institutional papers and legal definitions; architects’ and urbanists’ writings; philosophical reflections on space, memory, and the city; essays on the sociology of tourism and heritage tourism in particular; texts on the recent phenomenon of “nation branding” and “city branding”; literary texts on the city as a system of memories; and, finally, essays on the touristic densification of the Venice mainland.

The course will hinge around six topics:
1. The Official Documents
2. For Sale: The Economics of Memory
3. The Doge Must Fall? Of Monuments
4. “Where the Popular Houses Were”: Gentrification and Tourist Itineraries
5. The Branding of Cities
6. Cognitive Mapping

Learning outcomes of the course
At the end of the semester, students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a basic knowledge of the key debates and issues that underlie the relations between city planning, cultural heritage, gentrification and mass tourism.
2. Demonstrate an understanding of the constructed nature of concepts such as “historic center,” or “cultural heritage.”
3. Recognize the difficult relation between “preserving” and “re-inventing” the city’s past in the face of globalizing and homogenizing pressures.
4. Be able to recognize and discuss the key argument of an essay or literary text.
5. Produce a collaborative presentation involving reading of scholarly publications and critical thinking.

Teaching and evaluation methods
The course will be delivered through a combination of lectures, seminar activities, site visits, and students’ group presentations. Site visits are an integral part of the class, and are not optional. Students are expected to take active part in class discussion and will produce, besides one group presentation per student, weekly blog entries (one entry per week) on the topics discussed.

Final grades will be composites of the following:
Class participation, preparation, and attendance: 30%
Weekly blog entries: 30%
Group Presentation: 40%

Bibliography
All course readings are in English and will consist of journal articles as well as book chapters selected from the following texts:

The Athens Charter for the Restoration of Historic Monuments (1931) The Venice Charter (1964)
UNESCO Convention for the protection of world patrimony (1972)

UNESCO Criteria for the evaluation of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (2008)

Alkcan, Esra. “Reading ‘The Generic City’: Retroactive Manifestos for Global Cities of the Twenty-First Century.” Perspecta, Vol. 41, Grand Tour (2008), pp. 144-152.

Anholt, Simon. Competitive Identity: The New Brand Management for Nations, Cities and Regions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978.

Carter, Nick, and Simon Martin. “Dealing With Difficult Heritage: Italy and the Material Legacies of Fascism.” Modern Italy 24.02 (2019): 117-22.

Choay, Françoise. The Invention of the Historic Monument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

García-Hernández, María, Manuel de la Calle-Vaquero, and Claudia Yubero. “Cultural Heritage and Urban Tourism: Historic City Centres Under Pressure.” Sustainability 9.8 (2017): 1-19.

Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

McCarthy, Mary. Venice Observed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956. Häusler, Eric, and Jürgen Häusler. How Cities Become Brands. London: Springer, 2024. Koolhaas, Rem. S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998.
Ruskin, John. The Seven Lamps of Architecture. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1849.

Tafuri, Manfredo.Architecture and Utopia : Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976. pp. 41-50.

Vallerani, Francesco. “Urban Sprawl on the Venice Mainland: Risks for the Regional Public Heritage.” Revista Movimentos Sociais e Dinâmicas Espaciais 1.1 (2012): 130-47.

Last updated on October 13, 2025