(in Polish) Anthropology of Planetary Urbanization

general courses

For a decade now, more than half of humanity dwells in cities. Homo sapiens has thus transformed from a rural to an urban species. This is the gist of a planetary urbanization. Its second feature lays in the fact that the epicentre of urban growth has inevitably moved from the West to the Global South. It is no longer Paris or New York, but Lagos, Sao Paulo or Dubai that have become "future cities". This momentous change means that right in front of our eyes the meanings of “city life” and “urbanization” is being fundamentally redefined. The aim of this course is to equip students with a conceptual toolbox that will allow them to understand the dynamics of this planetary urbanization.

Equipped only with intellectual tools inherited from 20th century science, we are powerless in the face of this process. Our entire conceptual apparatus in urban studies was generated on the basis of Western historical experience. Therefore, the starting point for this seminar will be the spatial processes currently unfolding in megacities cities from each continent – from Tokio, through Kinshasa, Teheran to Sao Paulo. On the basis of key monographs, we will discuss how radical planetary urbanization is. Does it really entail a fundamental transformation of almost every sphere of human life, as some authors have claimed?

One of the challenges posed by planetary urbanization is trying to suture, to borrow Filip de Boeck’s term, many urban fragments into a coherent whole. On the one hand we have a myriad of theoretical texts describing the planetary scale of total urbanization (e.g. Neil Brenner’s Imposions/explosions is a good case in point), and on the other hand there is a lot of micro-scale studies on a specific urban issue (transport, environment, housing, etc.) or a specific place (neighborhood, district, etc.). There is only a handful of good analyses on the mezo scale – ones that capture what we can called the “structured urban coherence”.

How to research and write about agglomerations in which 40 million people dwell? Are we doomed only to describe fragments or can we try to forge a synthesis of these new urban spaces? Readings, which will be the basis of this seminar, show how to look for this key to understanding the uniqueness of particular places - even if they are sprawling megacities with millions of dwellers. We will compare and contrast different attempts to analyze the “spatial coherence” of these dynamic and constantly changing entities.

A detailed syllabus will be provided to the students during the very first class. All the readings will be available in an electronic format.

The course will be organized around the following thematic blocks as well as monographs:

Introduction: A total urbanization

What constitutes "urban spatial cohesion"? Why generating a new, grounded theory, of social processes shaping the 21st century ought to Begin with understanding planetary urbanization? Why do established theories hinder us more than help us understand such contemporary socio-economic processes. What does the method of "global materialism" entail?

Readings: Brenner, Neil, (eds). Implosions/explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Berlin, Jovis, 2014 (selected articles)

Urban Theory Beyond the West

In 1950, there were only 2 megacities in the world - New York and Tokyo. Yet it was New York that became the paradigmatic testing ground for creating concepts in urban studies. What if we chose Tokyo (the largest city in the world to this day by most estimates) as our starting point in forging urban theory? Hidenobu Jinnai, author of the most important book on Tokyo, shows how to do it literally. His book is a description of the city's unique logic of spatial expansion which he discovered by walking the city. The Tokyo planning philosophy, although nowhere and never codified nor expressed through a formal document, is extremely coherent and represents a viable alternative to the Western model of urban development.

Readings: Hidebobu Jinnai, Tokyo: a Spatial Anthropology. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995 (excerpts)

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Mike Davis' City of Quartz remains to be one of the most important books in urban studies as well as a paradigmatic example of how, at the interstice of space-anchored analysis of politics, economy and culture, to look for the “key” to explaining the logic of individual cities. Why are the cities - in this case Los Angeles at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s - the laboratories of the future? Why is the urban process a contingent one? How to generate a holistic (anthropological) theory of a city?

Readings: Mike Davis, City Of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London, Verso 1998 (excerpts)

(In)visible spaces and occult experiences

The book accompanying the winning exhibition at the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2004 remains an unrivalled example of how to explore what is invisible, fugutive or even absent in the city. Filip de Boeck sets the cognitive limits of "global materialism" as a research strategy, at the same time showing why human bodies are the fundaemtnal infrastructure in the cities of the global South.

Readings: Filip de Boeck, Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City. Leuven, Leuven University Press 2004 (excerpts)

Politics of the street and insurgent citizenships

Asef Bayat and James Holston writing about Tehran's "urban non-movements” and analyzing the genesis of Brazilian " insurgent citizenship show that in order to understand the contemporary political process, we need to eschew the Western dichotomy between public and private spaces. How did the marginal slum dwellers (in Brazil) or the small and often unnoticed street peddlers in Tehran become central collective subjects in national politics? Why everyday street politics represents the material basis for claiming one’s "right to the city"?

Readings: Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998 (excerpts); James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship. Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009 (excerpts)

Biographical contradictions of capitalism

Pulitzer-winning non-fiction by the sociologist Mathew Desmond analyzing the landscape of evictions in Milwaukee represents one of the outstanding examples of how to combine a structural analysis of the logic of urban capitalism with a telling individual stories of blood-and-flesh people. How to write academic monographs that can be read like a page-turning novel? How to expose the mechanism of global capitalism through the description of one (wo)man's history?

Readings: Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, London, Allen Lane, 2016 (excerpts)

Labor in the city – a planet of slums or a planet of workers?

The place of residence represents the knee-jerk starting point for urban research. Thus the place of work – where we spend an important part of the day - remains often unnoticed. Paul Mason's global history of working class formation shows the diversity of urban (and political) working cultures in today’s megacities. He builds an analogy between the struggles of today's workers in the cities of the Global South and the achievements and struggles of Euro-American workers at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Only when we include work in our analysis of planetary urbanization will we see that the last 20 years have not only been an unprecedented urbanization of our planet, but also the greatest industrial revolution in the history of mankind.

Readings: Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, London, Vintage, 2008 (excerpts)

Vernacular Warsaw

There has been a vertiable renaissance of urban research over the past 10 years or so in Poland. In the case of Warsaw, this translated mainly into a (re)discovery of Warsaw’s architecture. The edited volume “The Make Yourself Home Guide to Warsaw” represents a break from the (new) tradition of rehabilitating of Warsaw urban history through the appreciation of its modernist buildings. Instead, it focuses on the vernacular – and often ignored quotidian dimensions. The theory-driven non-fiction by Remigiusz Ryziński goes into a similar direction, by unearthing “little” urban traditions and idioms. Both books put the periphery at the very center of both attention and urban research. Does the key for understaning Warsaw’s “urban coherence” lay in appreciating its everyday life?

Readings: Warszawa. Podręcznik zamieszkiwania, red. Edwin Gardner, Christiaan Fruneaux, Anna Ptak i Rani Al Rajji, Warszawa, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2015 (selected articles);

Remigiusz Ryziński, Foucault w Warszawie. Warszawa, Dowody na Istnienie, 2017 (excerpts)

Basic literature:

1. Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998

2. Filip de Boeck, Kinshasa. Tales of the Invisible City. Leuven, Leuven University Press 2004

3. Brenner, Neil, (eds). Implosions/explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Berlin, Jovis, 2014.

4. Mike Davis, City Of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London, Verso 1998

5. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, London, Allen Lane, 2016

6. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship. Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009.

7. Hidebobu Jinnai, Tokyo: a Spatial Anthropology. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.

8. Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, London, Vintage, 2008

9. Warszawa. Podręcznik zamieszkiwania, red. Edwin Gardner, Christiaan Fruneaux, Anna Ptak i Rani Al Rajji, Warszawa, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2015;

10. Remigiusz Ryziński, Foucault w Warszawie. Warszawa, Dowody na Istnienie, 2017

In terms of knowledge, the student:

(1) Student knows and understands the paradigm of interdisciplinary of urbanisation studies.

(2) Is able to analyze the functioning of spatial structures in cities in the global perspective.

In terms of skills, the student:

(1) Has English language skills in accordance with the requirements of B2+ level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

In terms of social skills, the student:

(1) Cooperates and works in a group, assuming various roles.

Attendance and active participation in the sessions (20%), one presentation of a prescribed text (30%) and either an oral exam or a term paper (50%)