Courses

Global Urbanism

The course will cover some of the major urban conditions in the world today. Cities are at the forefront of a range of global governance challenges and novel types of politics, both formal and informal. Many of today's major global governance challenges become concrete, urgent and practical in cities worldwide. Urban leaderships and urban activists have had to deal with issues long before national governments and inter-state treaties addressed them. It is also in cities that these challenges can be studied empirically and that policy design and implementation becomes more feasible than at national levels. Among these global governance challenges we will focus particularly on those concerning the environment, decaying and new types of urban infrastructures, human insecurity (as distinct from national state security), racisms of all sorts, new types of inequalities, new types of formal and informal political actors and initiatives, and emerging inter-city networks involving a broad range of actors (NGOs, formal urban governments, informal activists, global firms, immigrants). The course draws both on classical texts about cities (do they still work for us, what do they fail to account for) and on the diverse new literatures on cities and slums. We will use a variety of data sets to get at detailed empirical information, and draw on two large ongoing research projects involving major and minor global cities around the world (a total of over 60 cities are covered in detail as of 2008). We will also deal with some of the new theoretical questions that arise out of our current urban age, ranging from the urbanizing of a whole range of dynamics and conditions that are not urban per se, to the possibly foundational transformation in the civic features of cities, in the meaning of cityness itself.