Ghost Guides to Tokyo

Winter 2017. UCLA Architecture & Urban Planning

ARCH UD 289.1 / URBN PLN 298

Urban Humanities: Ghost Guides to Tokyo

University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA)

* Interdisciplinary Graduate Course

* Includes Fieldwork in Tokyo (1 week)

* 2 Units

* Fieldwork in collaboration with Waseda University, Tokyo JP

* Co-taught with Dana Cuff & Maite Zubiaurre

Course Description

The winter term’s 2-unit seminar continues to introduce Tokyo as a spatial, historical, cultural, architectural, and political site of urban transformation, as well as prepares students for the Tokyo Fieldwork trip (March 24 to April 1). Entitled “Ghost Guides to the City: Tokyo & Los Angeles,” the seminar takes ways to explore the city, looking at fiction, film, history, architecture and urban studies as different types of actual and metaphorical guides. The task this term is to grapple with the question of urban and cultural erasure, using the metaphor of the ghost and with it the ghost guide as our vehicle. We will begin our investigations right here in Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo, where we aim to build a toolkit of field-based and scholarly practices, which we will later use in Tokyo proper. Our focus remains on the erasures for Tokyo of the 1964 Olympics and the future archeology of the 2020 Olympics. As the quarter progresses, we will begin to set up the Tokyo fieldwork projects and further develop our growing understandings of Tokyo through seminars, workshops and preliminary research.