COURSE
CRITICAL URBANISMS INTRODUCTION
University of Basel, Urban Studies, MA Critical Urbanisms
18-22 September 2023
Kenny Cupers, Andrew Tucker, Lea Nienhoff
''The course introduces selected current debates in critical urban studies generally and themes that frame the Masters in Critical Urbanisms in particular. In order to explain why urban problems persist or how cities change the way they do, observers often rely on unspoken assumptions, theoretical constructs, or inherited perspectives. Their explanations, in turn, are used by a range of actors to legitimize policies or mobilize forms of intervention.
Drawing from the disciplines of geography, architecture, law, political science, history, and anthropology, the course explores the relationship between urban challenges, urban theories, and urban practices; learning to unpack and explicate ways of seeing and making sense of cities and landscapes and exploring how research paradigms bear on specific theories as well as practices and lived experience.''
JOURNAL
OF SMALL STEPS AND GREAT EFFECTS
BURCKHARDT
We live in an invisible environment. However, since it is a social environment, it must consist of visible objects within visible spaces. This is the only way we can experience social phenomena and align ourselves with the tangible environment.
When seeking to have a good time, most people gravitate toward places with pleasant landscapes. These areas are often referred to as indeterminate zones—spaces that lie between two defined zones. In this context, it becomes possible to propose meaningful aesthetic theories and establish the essential parameters of these appealing places. These zones, situated between two exploited areas, are known as unexploited zones, defined by their unique existence.
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
BURCKHARDT
Children's books often depict environments that are socially pure and physically enchanting, where social roles are stable and well-defined. These books present a world where social roles are clear, but the spatial boundaries are not; the zones within these stories are vast and socially ambiguous.
The environments we inhabit should be envisioned in ways that encourage and anticipate social roles, thereby supporting social structures, behaviors, and phenomena. Furthermore, in the wake of the modern movement, arguments have emerged advocating for a particular kind of satisfaction within the living environment—one that fosters contentment. Consequently, our environments should be designed to align with the ideal of feeling complete and fulfilled, as imagined in the mind’s eye.
CITY FUTURES
CONFRONTING THE CRISIS OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT
PIETERSE
Reconceptualizing politics in cities involves adopting a conceptual approach to validate theoretical frameworks that recognize democracy as the most practical and productive means of navigating the complexities of urban politics, where competing priorities often collide.
The proposed conceptual model builds on a range of recent theories in urban studies, political science, policy studies, urban planning, and development studies. This model of urban politics emerges from foundational aspects drawn from these disciplines, offering a multidimensional perspective on addressing urban challenges.
CONCEPTUAL PREMISSES
PIETERSE
The ethical foundation should define how urban politics is envisioned, practiced, and institutionalized.
Democracy is a crucial prerequisite for fostering a vibrant political space, as it enables regulated debates centered on specific interests. The institutional and functional dimensions of urban politics are fundamental to maintaining the democratic content of political practices.
In the context of neoliberal dominance, the conceptual distinctions between government, governmentality, and governance are essential for understanding both the potentials and the limitations of the local state.
An effective urban political arena requires an understanding of spatiality, encompassing densities, proximities, and consistencies. Cities must be considered through their spatial dimensions, design, and context.
The non-essentialist concepts of identity and community offer pluralistic perspectives on the city.
To sustain the political-economic system, it is necessary for political discussions to emerge around discursively constructed focal points.
PROLOGUE: LOSE YOUR MOTHER
HARTMAN
"Obruni; a stranger, a foreigner from across the sea. Obruni made me confront the reality that I didn’t truly belong anywhere. Deep down, I longed to belong—or at least to have a convenient explanation for why I always felt like an outsider."
"My appearance confirmed it: I was the proverbial outsider. The realm of the stranger is always an elusive elsewhere. I was born in another country, where I also felt alien, a feeling that partly drove me to Ghana."
THE PATH OF STRANGERS
HARTMAN
"The most universal definition of a slave is a stranger. I had to come to Ghana in search of strangers. Slavery had established a measure of humanity—a ranking of life and worth—that remains unbroken to this day. I chose Ghana because it held more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa. Neither blood nor belonging explained my presence there; only the path of strangers, driven toward the sea, brought me."
"Slavery was never mentioned at my school. Being a stranger is not just about familiarity, belonging, or exclusion—it also entails a unique relationship to the past. I am the remnant of a silenced history, a testament to how the secular world acknowledges its dead."
FORENSIS
WEIZMAN
A critical aspect of forensic practice was lost during its modernization, particularly its potential as a political tool. The concept of forensis seeks to reintroduce this dimension by bringing new sensibilities to materiality and aesthetics, applying them to the legal and political implications of state violence, armed conflict, and climate change.
As an operative concept, forensis relates not only to the actions and collaborations of states but also to critical reflections on the scales of bodies, buildings, territories, and their digital representations. It is currently framed as a committed and critical forensic practice.
Forensis aims to encompass both the production of evidence and the interrogation of evidence-making processes. However, acts of political and legal activism must navigate a complex terrain marked by compromise, complicity, resistance, and evasion. As such, forensis refers to an operative concept and critical practice where the "critical" signifies something vital, crucial, and decisive.
FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE
WEIZMAN
Forensic architecture draws inspiration from buildings in contexts where the structural and infrastructural conditions of a building are meticulously analyzed. Buildings are not merely passive elements or receptive sensors where events are registered, nor are they solely the scenes of crimes or locations of violence. Instead, within forensic architecture, built environments are understood as composite assemblies—comprising structures, spaces, infrastructure, services, and technologies—that possess the capacity to act, interact with their surroundings, and influence events.
In this framework, forensic architecture regards buildings as sensors aestheticized by their environments. However, this form of aesthetics is not solely about human judgment. While aesthetics is traditionally associated with the human senses, in this context, it refers to the sensorial capacity of matter itself, extending beyond human perception to encompass the material and environmental dimensions of architecture.
HINTERLANDS OF THE CAPITALOCENE
BRENNER AND KATSIKIS
Hinterland refers to non-urban spaces drawn into the whirlpool of urbanization, functioning as supplementary zones, logistical hubs, effect areas, and more. However, their role in urbanization processes remains an open question. The dynamics between cities and hinterlands are not merely about externally related zones or areas; instead, they are mutually interlinked and integral to the urbanization process.
Although design disciplines and social sciences have historically overlooked the hinterland question, treating it as either secondary or inconsequential, it is increasingly evident that these spaces are crucial to understanding contemporary urbanization.
METABOLIC DYNAMICS OF URBANIZATION
BRENNER AND KATSIKIS
To decode the role of hinterlands in shaping the metabolic dynamics of urbanization under capitalism, we must rethink their character in the age of capital, often referred to as the "Capitalocene." Exploring these issues necessitates a historical analysis of the social, infrastructural, institutional, and environmental geographies of hinterlandized areas, which have been profoundly transformed by capitalism, particularly during the Industrial Revolution and through the spatial strategies of the state.
Examining hinterlands within the context of the Capitalocene also raises classic questions about the relationships between cities and empires. These inquiries highlight the role of cities as pioneers of colonial territorial expansion and vehicles of ideological dominance.
GLOBAL URBANISM
KNOWLEDGE, POWER AND THE CITY
LANCIONE AND MCFARLANE
Global urbanism is an empirical exploration of the essential relationships between the global and the urban for urban scholars and activists. The term seeks to understand the meaning of different lives from a global-urban perspective and the various references it encompasses.
NAVIGATING THE GLOBAL URBAN
LANCIONE AND MCFARLANE
Defining a view of global urbanism requires a coherent body of theory and practice, alongside shared ideas and inspirations from around the world, fostering creative possibilities. This view primarily focuses on globally produced megacities through the lens of planetarity. It seeks to offer guidance through logics, systems, networks, and entities informed by multiple epistemologies, inviting us into a nonlinear dialogue about the patterns of global urbanization and the varying conceptions of what a city is. Crucially, anti-racist struggles, forms of capitalism, and exhausted ecologies emerge as central concerns that shape the actions in our cities, while the politics speak for themselves. Global urbanism represents a heterodox set of voices that address the political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic power of neoliberalization.
COMPARATIVE URBANISM
ROBINSON
Urban forms and processes are distributed in diverse ways across different urban contexts, highlighting the need and potential to explore, for example, large-scale developments or satellite cities within a range of urban settings that address issues of difference, inequality, and exclusion. Through comparative analysis, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of a phenomenon or problem by examining a variety of cases. Urban comparativism, therefore, emerges as a practice that allows researchers to innovate, expand, enrich, or perhaps challenge existing concepts. The conceptual practices shaped by emerging topics in urban theory are transforming the landscape of global urban studies. This transformation is challenging the institutional norms of scholarly production and advancing comparative urban imaginations, mobilized by scholars around the world.
TRANSFORMING URBAN STUDIES
ROBINSON
Changing practices within urban institutions should involve detailed empirical research conducted by scholars whose original knowledge is often obscured by their physical and social contexts. It is essential to provide careful, accurate, and respectful interpretations of their work, amplify their insights, and elevate marginalized voices through critical engagement. This approach is crucial for advancing global urban studies, particularly in the context of institutional transformations.
WHAT IS CRITICAL URBANISM
UNIVERSITY OF BASEL
''Critical Urbanism explores how urbanists learn from the past, from their own modes of practice, from collaborations and confrontations, and from the unabated creativity of urban life. By approaching urban research as pedagogy, it offers critical pathways to understand, engage with, and teach the messy and often contradictory realities of cities. Spanning a productive spectrum of humanities, social science, and architectural methods, it offers an approach to urban studies that works in and across disciplines, debates, and cultures of expertise, and across cities south, north, east, and west.''
''Critical Urbanisms is a program situated at extremes, connecting a Swiss university with a long humanities tradition in the quaint and wealthy city of Basel to one of the leading research centers of African urbanism, located in Cape Town. It is a program of critical urban studies from which alternative modes of learning, practices of knowledge translation, and an ethos of engagement have emerged. It is an experiment in simultaneously inhabiting the academy and the city across continents, working with rigor and joy in and between both theory and practice to address a world undergoing constant and often radical changes.''
AN ETHOS OF CRITICAL URBANISM
UNIVERSITY OF BASEL
''1. Was of Knowing the City: This module explores epistemological contradictions underlying urban studies. It is interested in how disciplinary and methodological perspectives foreground multiple and, at times, incommensurable ways of knowing the city.
2. In Between Theory and Practice: This module examines modes of engagement in urban studies. It focuses on the political and ethical tensions arising from doing research in different urban and global settings.
3. The Urban beyond North and South: This module asks how urban studies are shaped by geographically situated claims of validity. Here, it is interrogating dominant binaries, such as North versus South.
4. The Present of the Past: This module focuses on the multiple temporalities that inhabit the city. It asks how an awareness of historical inheritances and colonial afterlives redefines contemporary urban challenges.''
KEY STATEMENTS
Aesthetic order
Social dimensions of architecture
Complex urban dynamics
Describing the world as urban
Logistical urbanism
Modern, industrial city
The violence of the modern movement in cities
The meaning of decolonization today
Urban realities, government, and policies
Art cannot be ignored in cities
Rational capitalism and colonialism
Empirical research: sensing the city
Seeing the city from the perspective of another space
Culture as a specific entity
Epistemology as a way of understanding cities
Urban phenomenon
The complex landscape of disciplines
Gender and race issues
The history of knowledge
The distinction between epistemology and ontology
There is no single way of knowing the city
The knowledge system
Movement of the body through the city
The ways gender defines the urban fabric
Conflicting nationalities
Normative ideas about citizenship
Politics in Western modernist logic
History is about what changes and what stays the same
Structural racism
Universal citizenship
French power blocks of housing as monuments to the French emperor
Corbusier: Separating different functions, home as a functional machine
Wartime mobilization, logistic operations, and industrial methods in housing
Heterosexual families, class divisions, and racist dimensions in housing
Utopias can fail
Rights for the city
Habitat's response to architectural design challenges
Marginalized residents and citizens
Architects are not heroes
Neoliberal urban policies: punishing and controlling
Heteronormativity and male dominance are two strong norms
Social dimensions of city aesthetics
The ideologies in city aesthetics
Informal places in the city
Urbanization, industrialization, and economic opportunities
The nature of the state in a postcolonial context, as a norm
The city of conflict and different realities
Cooperation and collaboration in the city
The city as a problem
The definitions of global urbanism
The real meaning of infrastructure in the city
Invisible structures in the city based on human context
Everyday issues in the city
Design means something different to everyone
Speculative, rooted design
Bridging the gap between theory and practice
Anything outside of the academy needs theory and practice
In the academy, arguments are possible
Knowledge co-production and re-orientation in the city
European modernist ideas versus African identity
(Post)(de)(neo)colonialism
Values of white civilization
Learning the world from Africa: interconnections
The South is not only a geographical space, but also relationships
Structural relations, space, power, and knowledge
Bourgeois urbanism
Sudden urbanism is not African urbanism
Public sphere
Political practices in forensic architecture
Knowledge and connected geographical location
Heterotopia: designing for certain families and people
Masculine labor and occupation of land
Local social dynamics resonate with global components
Modern urbanism, social reform, and extreme poverty
The Atlantic system of slave trades
Transforming human beings into things
Planetary urbanization, global conditions, and slavery
Modern state, market, production, and capitalism
Rural areas and non-humans shape the city
Postcolonial migration politics, circulation, movement
Western modernity's foundation based on the South
Railways and the roads of empire
Road stories and narratives of colonialism
Understanding differences and empirics
Understanding the difference of difference
Materiality, spatial locations
Empirics of megacities
Similarity does not mean the same for cities
Hinterlands are connected to the city
Assumptions behind the hinterland
Geopolitical context shapes urban dynamics
Rural-urban revolution
Demographic and postcolonial shifts in cities
Universal aspirations are not about distance
Comparative gestures in cities
The impossibility of equality
Political spectrum and injustice
Positionality embedded in research
The past is not in the past; it is still in the present
Working on heritage is about the future
Methodology, research, and pedagogy
Past, present, and future readings
City as a Living Archive
Territories of the urban
Contouring certain narratives in fascist Italy
Narratives dominated by certain actors
Heteronormativity and fascist families
Domination, certain aesthetics, and function
Social experiments in colonializing the land
The archaeology of the future
Certain hierarchies through modern lenses
Ethnography as a method of research
Not setting a canon around critical urbanism
Designing better cities and spatial configurations
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