Academics
HNRS 390: Berlin and the Quality of Life (3 credits)
Professor Ian F McNeely, Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
Ideas in Action: HI-RESEARCH
This course uses Berlin as a case study for an immersive field research project focused on the quality of life in Europe. You will begin by comparing communist, totalitarian East Berlin with countercultural, multicultural West Berlin during the decades when the Berlin Wall divided them. You will then turn to the city’s dramatic modernization since German reunification and its role today as the capital of the largest democracy in Europe. Along the way, we will take a side trip to Vienna, which is often ranked as the world’s most livable city. German-speaking Europe boasts some of highest measures of human development found anywhere, and we want to explore why.
Berlin is famous for its neighborhoods or Kieze, from leafy majestic suburbs to gritty urban melting pots. For your field research projects, you will select two Kieze and compare them using a combination of social-scientific methods and experiential investigation. The aim, again, is to acquire a deep understanding of the quality of life in Berlin and across Europe generally.
In the course, students will:
- Compare life in a European city with life in Chapel Hill and other places you have lived.
- Contrast the quality of life in East Berlin and West Berlin, plus the political ideologies that governed each, during the decades when the Wall stood.
- Analyze the physical, demographic, economic, and cultural changes brought to Berlin by German reunification.
- Use Berlin and its Kieze to study the quality of life using a combination of social-scientific methods and experiential investigation.
- Assess the role of democracy and social policy in improving the quality of life in Europe and the United States.
It is recommended for students to have taken one FC-PAST, FC-GLOBAL, or FC-POWER prior to the program.
