The Urban Question Today
Syllabus
Photo Credit: Ghost in the Shell Cyberpank city by Alex Feliksovich
Description
“The Urban Question Today: 10 Concepts” critically engages with a set of contemporary urban challenges and problematics through an interdisciplinary lens. Methodologically organised as an agile and experimental (AI assisted) writing workshop, it aims at collectively composing an Atlas of Urban Keywords through an articulation of close-reading, [re]writing, and visualisation techniques, strategically applied to deconstruct the meaning of ten selected critical texts revolving around the following themes: ‘posthuman’, ‘planetary urbanization’, ‘geoengineering’, ‘synthetic intelligence’, ‘climate futures’, ‘post-work imaginaries’, ‘degrowth’, ‘utopia’, ‘anthropocene’, and ‘third nature’.
Learning Objectives
At course completion the students will:
- Communicate complex ideas verbally as well as in written- and visual-form
- Have deployed imaginative/speculative and critical/analytical thinking skills
- Be able to situate arguments and ideas within the field(s) of urban discourse surveyed in the course
- Be able to articulate a critical position vis-a-vis the potential and limitations of AI writing platforms
Faculty
Faculty Assistants
Projects from this course
Anthropocene: Urbicidal Anthropocene
URBICIDAL ANTHROPOCENE: a concept within contemporary urban theory that criticizes the notion of resilience and advocates radical urban transformation in dual forms. The first form is the dismantling of environmentally endangered cities, and the second is the isolation from existing infrastructural networks. It promotes the pre-emptive destruction of already doomed unjust resilient cities and transforms … Read more
Degrowth: Urban Degrowth
Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency
THE SYNTHETIC
Selected excerpt “…the “synthetic” is a genuine and meaningful version of something that was deliberately created (such as a laboratory-grown diamond identical to a “natural” one at the molecular level). Thus, artificial intelligence merely seems smart, but synthetic intelligence really is. We should be pursuing synthetic intelligence, not artificial intelligence.” Chat GPT4_Itemization of ideas Synthetic … Read more
