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According to the United Nations, by mid-2000, almost half of the world's
6.1 billion inhabitants lived in urban areas and that proportion is
expected to reach 60 per cent in the next 25 years. As urbanisation
increases, there will be a need for greater knowledge of urban people
and practices in order to ensure quality of life around the world. Drawing
on understandings of cities and urbanism from anthropologists and sociologists,
architects, urban planners and geographers, policy makers and artists,
this course asks what it means to be - and become - urban.
In a world where technologies seem to render space and time irrelevant,
what happens to our sense of place? When cities embody global relations,
flows, migrations and cultural ties to far-off places, for whom does
the urban remain as tangible and clearly delimited as the medieval walled
city? How is city space and public life organised? What forms do power,
control and resistance take? What are the roles of "non-places"
in urban space? How does mobility shape urban experience? How do the
spectacular, the carnivalesque, and utopian dreams play out in urban
contexts? What is the relationship of consumption to urban living? How
do different people negotiate identities and experience everyday life
in the city?
Students will engage these and other questions in both local and global
contexts. Critical evaluation of theoretical and empirical research
will be complemented by stories of global cities, and a group research
project on urban cultures in Ottawa.
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