Professor: Kristin Koptiuch

Take a virtual tour through a selection of global cities in these web portfolios. Two analytical dimensions focus our critical lens: vernacular and transnational urbanism (in architecture, markets, consumer products, jobs, ads, ways of living, cultural practices, etc).  Cross-cutting  these, two increasingly prevalent spatial dimensions draw our attention within the built environment and social/cultural flows of global cities: slums and  dreamworlds of neoliberalism (or, "evil paradises"). By adopting virtual strategies of walking-in-the-city, we situate ourselves as transnational flâneurs tacking between the slums and skyscrapers of global cities. Our primary readings, listed in the menu, inspired these interpretive strategies.

Each Virtual Global Cities project is dedicated to a particular world city, and integrates virtual ethnographic documentation, visual images, scholarly literature annotations, with critical interpretive analysis to guide the user.

University students majoring in many different fields created these web portfolios. We make no claim to be expert urbanists, and our results may be a bit uneven. But in doing this collaborative project, we discovered that our comparative look through  the analytical lens described here offers some astounding insights about global cities.

ENJOY!