Cities and the Culture of Construction This course will explore
the relationship between mega-cities, design and construction in
the era of globalization. More specifically, we will seek to
conceptualize the idea of the �construction site� with its
technologies, practices and goals, its scope and scale. We will
also explore, conversely, various practices of urban
destruction, demolition and reconstruction. Two key organizing
texts for the course will be Guy Debord�s The Society of the
Spectacle (1967) and Comments on The Society of the Spectacle
(1988). These texts will highlight what it means to view
construction sites, in part, as spectacles. The twenty-first
century will be a century of mega-cities and mega construction
sites. China, whose urban world could be characterized as one
large construction site, is said to be building one hundred
cities with populations larger than 10 million each. Osama Bin
Laden, whose resources came from one of the world�s largest
construction families, invested his wealth in