Image credit: Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

Description

“We don’t create shit, we don’t build anything.”
—Mark Hanna, in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The second volume of the Theory of the Urban Seminar deepens the practice and method of reading urbanization by turning to the entangled relationship between financialization, the city, building forms, and urban subjects; only this time around the source materials for the course are expanded beyond scholarly literatures to incorporate film as critical media. Over four sessions, we will engage with a curated set of movies and texts that dramatize how financial logic shapes subjectivities, reconfigures urban life, and produces a world after its own abstract image. From the high-octane frenzy of (urban) speculation to the slow violence of enclosure, dispossession, and expulsion, each class juxtaposes cinematic narrative with theoretical discourse, illuminating how seemingly disembodied flows of capital materialize in the general form of the built environment as such. In doing so, Volume II of TotU extends the methodological grounding established in the introductory installment of the course—now inviting close- and hyper- readings of both textual as well as visual forms to unravel the financial-urban nexus underpinning the production of 21st century-space.

Learning Objectives

At course completion the student will:

• Have an understanding of the urgency of reconceptualizing practices of reading and writing scholarly as well as visual material to develop, nurture, and expand criticality in the age of AI and LLMs. This is the methodological objective of the course.
• Have the ability to develop original and substantiated positions on the issues/problematiques and case-studies (films/texts) discussed in the course—especially about the relationship between cities, nature, and design as seen through the lens of recent discourses within the field of urban, environmental, and media studies. This is the content-related objective of the course.
• Have the capacity to deploy ‘close-‘ and ‘hyper-reading’ techniques through which to decode the multiplicity of (spatial, political-economic, technological) dimensions that define the complex and multi-scalar character of the urban process.