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In this interdisciplinary course, students will embark on a comprehensive exploration of riverbanks, lake environments, coastal regions and island communities, seeking to capture the myriad ways they access and inhabit these areas in the 21st century. As a foundational component of the CCGL curriculum, we will venture beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries to consider the rich variation of human settlement, behavior, exchange, and evolution across global contexts.

Amidst the growing wave of island and coastal studies, anthropologists and sociologists have recently called for a holistic examination of cultural diversity in human societies. This call extends to often understudied and underappreciated regions of riverbanks, coastlines and islands, where new insights are now being interweaved across the arts, humanities and other social sciences. While conventional studies on traditional or hunter-gatherer societies classically tend to favor those inhabiting arid inland areas, students here will focus on the communities thriving along the shores that have historically occupied a peripheral place in archaeology, history, and cultural and media studies. Coastal societies offer abundant examples of behavioral and cultural evolution, with many religious icons, cultural ideas, linguistic patterns, and stories told and retold, featuring connections to the water. Students will learn how these regions also serve as natural conduits for migration, fostering cultural exchanges, and the flourishing of innovation and social networks.

This course will center the scholarship and important work for sustainable development in these environments, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through this course, students will recognize the importance of river and coastal societies in urban sustainability (SDG 11), future climate advocacy (SDG 13), by the water (SDG 14) and on land (SDG 15) in various worldwide contexts: from fishing First Nations and Inuit communities in northern Canada and Greenland, to the societies living in the depths of the jungle along the Congo River. We will even go back in time to the Palaeolithic, and learn about our early biological, behavioral and technological evolution, involving deep cultural engagement with, and regular exploitation of, marine resources. We will tie these cross-disciplinary perspectives to the study of Hong Kong's coast and communities, in Mui Wo, Tai O, Lei Yue Mun, Aberdeen, Sai Kung, etc. Students’ exposure to the intricate relationships between water, land and humanity will span regions, disciplines and cultures, shedding light on our paths to a more sustainable future.

Cities are regarded as our greatest inventions. As political, socio-economic, and cultural centres, they exemplify human ingenuity, power, and capacity to manipulate resources and the environment. They also play crucial roles in shaping human settlement and development on both individual and collective levels. As such, they define human existence, ways of life, and civilizations. Since the 1800s, the unprecedented process of urbanisation and urban development in scale and speed has turned our Planet Earth into an Earthopolis, an urban planet. Over 55% of the global population now live in cities 55%. The figure is estimated to rise to 68% by 2050. If the current urbanisation rate continues, the total global population living in cities could reach 100% by the end of this century. The unprecedented urbanisation and urban development process has a profound impact not only on our species but also on our planet as a whole. Though occupying only 3% of the Earth’s land surface (the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project), our world’s urban regions account for 80% of the global GDP, 60–80% of global energy consumption, 75% of global carbon emissions, and more than 75% of the world’s natural resource consumption. The future of humanity and our planet are fatefully linked with how our cities and urban regions are made and run. To understand how our species have become the ways we are; what fundamentally defines the ways we live and relate to each other and the wider world; how we are able to exert a planetary impact on Earth, and how we may achieve sustainable development, it is imperative to look into our urban trajectory and its milestones; learn from our urban heritage and experiences; reassess the nature, purposes, and functions of cities; examine our urban propensity and path dependency, and derive imaginaries from the millennium-long urban adaptation and reinventive process for our urban and planetary futures.

This course is designed to guide students in exploring the emergence of cities from the urban revolution around 5,000 BC to 4,000 BC first in Western Asia, through the key milestones of our urban evolution, to the current era of megacities and megaregions. In tracing this chronological trajectory, the course also trains students in examining the key issues involved in the making and remaking of cities in terms of urban form, social structure, functions, and historical circumstances and forces that shape these. The issues covered in this course include the birth of cities as a part of urban lifecycles; the projection of power; order and governance; disruption and reconfiguration; humanistic cities; building cities for mass populations; conflict, community, and faith; trends and competitions; unprecedented societal changes and urban growth; contemporary urbanism and our planetary future. We will focus on the development of a particular urbanism with its constituent cities as we expound each of these issues, while seeking to bring comparative case studies to illustrate how these issues have been unravelled in similar and diverse ways in other urbanisms and historical periods.

This course will equip students with individual and group research, critical thinking, policy analysis and recommendation, and spatial development skills through short weekly assignments, a group project on major land uses in local urban and regional development in Hong Kong within the Greater Bay Area of the Pearl River Delta, and a final research essay examining the urban development of a city in the historical or contemporary world on a particular issue covered in this course. Students will be guided systematically by the course lecturer and tutors on a weekly basis to deliver the expected outcomes as important exercises for their academic, professional, and personal growth in relation to cities.