All contents related to 2021 CCHU9034 course are placed and archive here.
Category: 2021 Blog
Lecture 9 What makes a global city
In our discussion, we agreed that the main factor that makes a city global is mixed culture from various countries. Regarding how people live within a global city, people from different cultures mix in with the different cultures of the city. For example, in the clip of Code 46, English-speaking characters are talking in front of a Dong Lion. English is culture from England or the United States while the Dong Lion is Chinese culture. The mixture of the two cultures makes how Shanghai appears to be a global city. Also, the contrast between characters wearing traditional and modern, western-style
[Reading Response: ]Carl Abbott
Abbotts’s piece introduces many different kinds of imagined cities in sci-fi movies. Although these cities were said to be ‘futuristic’, there are many parallels that can be drawn between them and the existing cities or cities that have been existed before. Take the distributed city ‘The Swarm’ which is constituted of airships serving different functions as an example, it resembles the cities that are involved in the global distribution of labour in the modern world. From this example, we can see that sci-fi movies have significance in foreseeing and predicting the possible trends that may occur in the future. By juxtaposing
[Reading Response] Carl Abbott
Abbott introduced several films that depicted the future of cities being desperate and grim. It is interesting to discover the underlying metaphor. Many fictions portrayed the future human society to be brutal. Abbott illustrated the Darwinism city in Mortal Engines, where social stratification is intensified to extreme: elite have privilege to open air while lower factories are struck in filth. This reminds me of 1984 which depicts how despotism eradicates people’s free will and creates an orderly utopia in disguise. Although whether these pessimistic predictions exaggerate the dark side of society remains questionable, they warn us against an evil entropy
[READING RESPONSE] Carl Abbott
This passage gives a lot of examples of imaginary worlds that inspired from the film. This raises a question for me. What would the future world be? I think imaginary world should be the world that people want in the future, should be full of love and passion. However, some imaginary worlds in film are really full of dark and pessimistic. People seems to be worried about their future, they usually tend see everything in a negative way. For example, people are afraid that one day AI may invade the Earth and dominate the world. I think people should put
Reading Response: Carl Abbot
Abbot’s text generated discussion during the tutorial in regards to how films that portray Sci-fi and the future affects its audiences. We identified the 21st century trend of more pessimistic Sci-fi films (notably Wall-E) compared to the 20th century which had more optimistic portrayals (Back to the Future). Personally dystopian future films have had a strong influence on me in terms of myself becoming more conscious of my day-to-day actions and how it affects the environment. However my prolonged exposure to these films have caused me to also become quite pessimistic about the future (I have no desire to see