This document outlines the course "Documentary & Everyday Urban Life" which examines cities through documentary films, creative works, and fieldwork. The course aims to study the invisible everyday processes that shape urban life through the perspectives of people in various occupations. Students will develop projects in Hong Kong neighborhoods to understand the social and cultural dimensions of cities. Assignments include group inequality projects, individual blogs, and presentations. Readings and films will provide frameworks for analyzing urban space and experience.

1. DOCUMENTARY & EVERYDAY URBAN LIFE
GE3106 | Sem A, 2015 | School of Creative Media |Prof SHANNON WALSH

2. Prof. Shannon Walsh
• Jeppe on a Friday (2012), 87 min
• St-Henri, the 26th of August (2011) 85 min
• H2Oil (2009) 76 min

6. COURSE OUTLINE
 BLOG : http://ge3106.wordpress.com
 Week-by-week breakdowns
 Lecture Slides online
 Readings and Films
 Meetings and Tours at various locations over the term
 Creative works and interactive blogs about city

7. Summary
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.

8. READ |WATCH | MAKE
ASSIGNMENTS
 1 Inequality (Team) 20%
 2 Cityscape Project 45%
 4 Personal Blog 20%
 Presentation & Participation 15 %

9. CELL PHONE FILMING

10. BLOGS
Create a course blog on either wordpress or weebly
This will be the space where you will upload your videos as well as your
photos and field notes or other reflections over the semester. We will be
able to share our work more easily with each other through the
online space.
1 response/critique piece to one of the readings (500-1000 words)
1 response/critique piece to one of the films (500-1000 words)
1 set of field notes with at least 5 documentary images of one of the field trips

11. READINGS
Álvarez, Iván Villarmea.
2015. Documenting Cityscapes: Urban
Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction
Films
Sassen, Saskia. 2005. The Global City:
Introducing a Concept
Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. “Building on
Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture
and Colonial Space” in Hong Kong:
Culture and the Politics of
Disappearance. Minneapolis, MN:
Minnesota University Press.

12. FILMS
TWO CLASS SECTIONS
 9AM – 11:50
 3PM – 6PM
I will play different films in the
two sections so if you would
like to watch both films, if there
is enough seating, you can join
the film in the other section.

13. CITY AS SPACE OF POSSIBILTY +
CITY AS FORMAL ARTISTIC CONSTRAINT

14. 14

15. 15

16. 16

17. 17
from Flaneur Society’s “Guide to Getting Lost”

18. WHERE ARE YOU?

19. SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (SI)
 A philosophy of space &
political action
 Formed in Italy 1957 through
the 1970s
 Guy Debord, Michel de
Certeau, Henri Lefebvre
 Student movement &
university movement in
France 1968
 how could everyday life be
subverted radically
19

20. 20

21. SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE vs
the LIBERATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
 Social alienation and commodity fetishism
advanced to every aspect of life and culture.
 The “spectacle” is the mediation of social
relations through objects & commodities
 To counteract the spectacle, creating situations
and moments of life for the explicit purpose of
awaking and pursuing authentic desires

22. Dérive
Drift…”migrations undertaken with the intention of discovering new
perspectives on city life”
“a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances”

23. 23

24. Autonomy & Power
The dérive held assumptions
of race, class, gender,
privilege — who could walk
freely, leisurely, curiously,
and where could they
walk…?
24

25. Psychogeography
Psychogeography is
"the study of the precise laws
and specific effects of the
geographical environment,
consciously organized or not,
on the emotions and behavior
of individuals.”
- Debord

26. Psychogeography
Explore everyday
environment and
streets of the city;
open up to play and
chance;
“transforming ‘the
whole of life into an
exciting game’ — the
play principle before
the work principle.”
26

27. “The need for the dérive is necessitated,
according to situationist theory, by the
increasingly predictable and monotonous
experience of everyday life trudged through
by workers in advanced capitalism.”
“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure
chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and
authentic experience of the different
atmospheres and feelings generated by the
urban landscape.”

28. As Henri Lefebvre argued, capitalist
spaces are systems of property relations,
surveillance, and consumption.
“It is through
everyday habits,
and through the
body, that people
experience urban
space”
The Production of Space (1991)
28

29. 29
“People have become divorced from authentic
experience, are passive spectators of their own
lives and no longer communicate or participate
in the society of the spectacle. The dominant form
of spectacular commodity production and
consumption ensures that people do not engage in
self-directed or autonomous activity, but answer the
needs of the spectacle.”
-Adam Barnard

30. THE CITY
EXPLORING THE WORLD AROUND US, SPACE, MEMORY, PLACE

31. "Dark Days" is a feature length documentary about a community of homeless
people living in a train tunnel beneath Manhattan. The film depicts a way of life
which is unimaginable to most of those who walk the streets above.
In the pitch blackness of the tunnel rats swarm through piles of garbage
and high-speed trains out of Penn station tear through the darkness.
DARK DAYS (2000), Marc Singer

32. "Dark Days" is a feature length documentary about a community of homeless
people living in a train tunnel beneath Manhattan. The film depicts a way of life
which is unimaginable to most of those who walk the streets above.
In the pitch blackness of the tunnel rats swarm through piles of garbage
and high-speed trains out of Penn station tear through the darkness.
URBANIZED (2011), Gary Hustwit