Pre-requisite
Course Objective
This course aims at a critical examination of the production of the city and the urban as a way of life.The student will be introduced to important theoretical perspectives on the study of the urban – Marx, Weber, Simmel, Castells, Lefebvre, Wirth, Harvey, de Certeau and Appadurai besides others.
Faculty
Course Content
This seminar course critically examines the production of urban space and culture. The ‘urban’ denotes an aspect of physical space as much as a way of life and a mentality. A critical reading of ethnographic studies on the city provides a cross-cultural perspective on how space becomes culturally meaningful. The rise of the urban centre and metropolis are the product of a certain historical moment, yet they also produce distinctive mentalities and cultures that are unique to them.
The course will explore the structuring and contestation of urban space through categories of class, ethnicity, status and gender and study the city as the location of discourses of and struggles for citizenship.