As a George L. Mosse Teaching Fellow, I crafted and taught a history course entitled “Europe’s Urban Age: From 1900 to Today” in the Spring 2024 semester. Over fourteen weeks, seventeen UW-Madison undergraduates and I explored the subfield of European Urban history through lectures, discussions, readings, and films. The course covered a time period that stretched from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries, during which the majority of Europeans became urbanites.
The course examined two main themes. The first was how European societies experienced, debated, designed, and managed their growing cities. This meant exploring urban planning, architecture, suburbanization, and social housing. The second was how major events of twentieth-century European history can be best understood when situated in the physical urban spaces where they took place. For instance, we studied topics like the end of Communism in East and Central Europe by looking at how people experienced the rise of the market economy in the streets of Warsaw and Berlin. The course aimed to introduce students to major themes of urban studies while also providing a background in contemporary history of Europe.
My motivation for offering this specific course came from several sources. First, it emerged directly from my dissertation research on housing politics in Paris and Milan in the 1970s. Teaching the class allowed me to share the findings and themes of my work with students while also providing me with a chance to place my specific research topic into a much broader sweep of history. Contemporary urban problems also motivated me to teach this course. The issue of housing scarcity and unaffordability is one of the biggest problems facing cities around the world today, affecting young people in particular. I wanted to use this course as an opportunity for students to examine present-day issues from a historical perspective, while also learning how housing crises have been an enduring feature of European cities and have elicited a variety of consequences and responses over time. I hoped that the class could raise awareness about pressing issues while also providing a historical perspective on present urban concerns.
From a historical and theoretical perspective, my goal was for students to gain both familiarity with the history of Europe’s cities and to develop a greater appreciation for spatial thinking. History courses often take on big problems, important ideas, and significant political movements without much attention to the specific places where they occurred. However, understanding the spaces in which they took place and their impacts on the built environment can provide crucial context. For example, in the course, we studied the creation of new nation-states after World War I in Central and Eastern Europe. We focused in on how new nations like Czechoslovakia or Hungary physically transformed their capital cities into showcases for these new nations’ history, people, and ideals. When presented from the streets of Budapest, we saw specifically how nation-state formation was contested as different monolithic visions of the nation clashed with the multi-cultural reality of these cities. Exploring how national capitals were built provided students concrete examples of how nationalism and identity played out on the street and in people’s lives.
Students in the weekly discussions were particularly drawn to the urban planning debates in various European societies. What would the “socialist home” look like in the newly formed Soviet Union? Would it be communal apartments or single-family dwellings? Or how was West Germany to rebuild after the Second World War? Should it encourage suburban home ownership or city-center apartments? These debates highlighted competing interests and ideologies in these societies and illustrated how ideologically-tinged outcomes influenced how urban Europeans lived and continue to live. Discussing historical urban planning also led students to think about the different housing arrangements available today, how different choices produce different lifestyles, and even how the legacy of urban planning and architectural choices shaped the possibilities for their lives.
Over the semester, students developed analytical and writing skills through various assignments. Most weeks, students had to write reading reflections based on the assigned readings. For example, in the twelfth week of the semester, students wrote about two readings on how Western European cities changed over the course of the 1970s and 1980s: the first explored deindustrialization and the rise of the service-based economy in the German port city of Hamburg while in the second they ready about Margaret Thatcher’s free-market housing reforms in England. In the short writing assignment, I asked students to summarize the main arguments of the texts, connect the texts to each other and to the course more broadly, and offer a personal reflection on the main themes explored. This analysis pushed students to read the texts for their main arguments, reflect on the inter-relation between economic and policy changes in the 1970s and 1980s, and connect the specific cases of England and Germany to broader global trends. Many students saw direct connections in these articles to the places where they had grown up.
Additionally, over the semester, students completed in-class presentations. During their session, they introduced the readings to their classmates and then guided the discussion by asking probing questions. By leading discussions in pairs, students had to work together to develop a plan for the class discussion that would elicit enthusiastic participation and foster debate on the week’s main topics. For some students, the reading analyses and leading discussions were a challenge. However, by learning from each other’s examples and regular feedback, students developed novel small-group activities that encouraged wide participation and collaboration.
The final assignment for the course asked students to develop a one-day workshop on any topic within twentieth-century European urban history. This project allowed each student to reflect more deeply on any topic of their choosing, explaining change and continuity over the more than a century covered. Students designed workshops on how governments with different ideologies used urban planning, how big economic changes like industrialization and de-industrialization transformed urban life, or how European cities were divided along lines of race and class. The students brought great enthusiasm to this assignment and collectively demonstrated a strong understanding of the course materials we examined together over the semester and showing their perspectives and interests.
While teaching was an exciting and rewarding experience, it was not without challenges. Writing lectures proved to be a major time commitment, full of difficult decisions. How much detail to include? How many examples are necessary to use to ensure understanding and engagement? How best to include discussions or videos in class? Each week brought with it these questions and more. I look forward to offering the wrestling with these questions the next time I teach Europe’s urban history.
Becoming an effective university instructor takes time, and I am so grateful to the George L. Mosse Program for providing me with my first opportunity to teach. I am specifically appreciative of the generosity of Stanley and Linda Sher, whose donation to the Program allowed me to take one semester to develop the course and another to teach it. This invaluable experience allowed me to explore new avenues of European urban history and to improve as a teacher. I hope future UW History graduate students get to participate in such an intellectually stimulating and professionally enriching undertaking.
Collin Bernard is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his MSc from the London School of Economics from the International History Department in 2017 and his B.A. from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His dissertation compares the relationship between housing movements in 1970s Paris, France, and Milan, Italy, and the communist parties in each country. The project looks at the interrelationship between urban change and left-wing politics to understand the transforming nature of Western European democracy at the end of the twentieth century. In the Spring of 2024, with the support of the George Mosse Teaching Fellowship, Collin taught a course on European cities in the twentieth century. The course emphasized the conflicting political visions for cities that remade urban Europe.