This upper-level course focuses on concepts and themes on the development of urbanism in the range of geographies of the “Global South.” Through our readings and discussions, we will aim to pluralize processes of urban development as they have unfolded at the intersection of scales: the city, the nation-state, and the transnational. At the same time, we will examine scholarship which theorizes from the Global South as a complex and differentiated geography with multiple histories and spaces where urban change is manifest.
The course is reading and discussion intensive and is structured thus: we first focus on histories and trajectories of urban development in colonial and post-colonial cities, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. In the second part of the course, our main focus is to look at relations of comparative urbanism across regions of the Global South: we focus on perspectives on urban informality, consider the periphery as a productive site for debates on comparative urbanism, and ask questions about urban infrastructure as a mediating force for examining relations of urban inequality. We next look into questions of the reconfiguration of the city under conditions of war and post-war reconstruction, with attendant frameworks of risk and vulnerability, as well as dispossession. We analyze how plans for redevelopment are framed in established cities with large informally-housed populations, as well as look at the context of newly developed urban centers. In this process, we ask about urban planning in contexts of redevelopment, displacement and inequality: might we imagine alternative forms of planning and dwelling for more inclusive futures in these cities?
Cross listed: AAAD 492