Reference no: EM132511451

Human communities have been theorized and imagined within the western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Renaissance. Particular intellectual focus of this paper should be the city, conceived since Aristotle as the proper habitat of humankind, and the relationship between the family or household and the state. Include texts from utopian writings and works of political theory. In addition to literary and philosophical texts, also look at visual and cartographic representations of cities and urban spaces.

Some of the questions that the paper can address:

Question 1: What answers have past ages evolved to the question of what the perfect human community would be like?

Question 2: What factors have been determined as critical to the construction(and destruction) of communities?

Question 3: In what ways have the relationships between the individual, the family, and the community or state been conceived

Question 4: What role has the notion of the city played in political thought?

Question 5: In what ways has urban space been conceived and represented through visual media?

Question 6: In what ways have factors such as gender, class, race, and religion inflected the conceptualization and use of urban space?

Question 7: How has the notion of the city played out in imaginative literature- as ideal, as dystopia, and as locus for human experience and agency?