Cities and Globalization

UD

62010

Cities and Globalization

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, our understandings of the city are changing rapidly. Cities come in all different sizes - small, medium, large and mega. Each scale presents different issues and provides different interfaces to global flows of finance, technology, media, migrants and ideas. The concept of the city, which has long provided an orientation to urban space, politics, economy and imagination is increasingly inadequate to capturing the scalar differences unleashed by processes of globalization and the intensification of urbanization across different national territories. This course examines the dominant ideologies of urban form, culture and socio-political difference associated with each urban scale. Planetary urbanism, informality, techno-utopian views embedded in discourses of ‘smart’/resilient cities and emerging conversations around conflict as inspiration for urban change are some of the dominant frameworks within which globalization and urbanization intersect. We will follow each of these frameworks and their implications for understanding contemporary urbanization. With a special focus on the anthropology of the city, we will aim to discover the common infrastructures that link cities as different from each other as New York, Kinshasa, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai as well as developing strategies for understanding how history, culture and politics introduce difference into the world of cities. If globalization is fundamentally about creating networks and enabling flows, how can we surmount the forces that constantly block some flows and enable others? Based on these understandings, we will discuss and critique models of urban design, design briefs followed to execute urban plans and their underlying tools for adaptation. Our goal is to create a new kind of design brief, one that is based on a careful understanding of different scales of change and that has the potential to engender a city that is hospitable to different kinds of flows, to difference itself, a place where agonism and opposition - between social and cultural others, between haves and have-nots, between humans and nonhumans - can be channeled creatively.

Graduate

No