果冻影院

The module covers a critical reflection on the epistemology and the ontology of urban design in a renewed prospective highlighting the tensions between its theoretical and conceptual coordinates and its current global problematiques. It aims to offer a series of conceptual building blocks to construct a theoretical and critical understanding of urban design as discipline and practice, conceptualising it as a project of city making for collective existence. It introduces students to a common vocabulary of concepts and theories on urbanism, political economy of space, urban studies and urban sociology expanded with the use of critical theory, philosophy, and cultural studies.
It offers the opportunity familiarising with authors, ideas and literatures that can help reflecting on the complex realm of imagination, representation and design of urban futures and therefore conceiving urban design as part of an expanded field, where the many scales of architecture are manifested 鈥揻rom their urban manifestation to how building and spaces are conceived, occupied, and used, incorporating objects, spaces and meanings.Putting at the centre the urban project as emerging from constitutive tensions with space and society the module assess and present different urban theories and their re-thinking the city not as an epiphenomenon rather is the very looking glass through which to see the world today critically. Specifically the module suggest a relational view of urban desing theories where the key overlapping tensions of 1) power and knowledge, 2) politics and life and 3) bodies and spaces are framing the current urban project. This allows to engage with the politics of city making as double dimension of both creation of a new urban subjectivity with all its contradiction and places and allow to expand the task of thinking the politics of the project of the city spatially as a question of collective existence.
Theory and specifically critical theory are at the centre of the module intended as a manner of looking at the urban and the spatial practices as both a re-examination of the significance and complications of the critical gesture and the systematic questioning of the obscured issues, ignored debates and neglected alternative trajectories of its tradition. Specifically, the module attempt suggesting provincializing our concepts (time and space) that have served to normalise and colonise the planet to become vulnerable and to embrace not the unknown but the unknowable and explore the unfamiliar life of things.
The importance of the re-appropriation of a theory laden reflection on and from the city and an extra dose of critical theory is a direct consequence both of the centrality of the city to human life as a life lived with and among others, and of the way the collective of human life is now explicitly played out within and in relation to urban contexts. Engaging with urban design philosophically means the opening of a mode of inquiry that asks both questions on the nature, the form and the essence of the city itself and the modes of life and existence that the city enables. This involves not only what emerges within the physical bounds of the city, but also that which arises in the larger space鈥攚ithin the city or without, materially or conceptually 鈥攖o which the urban gives rise. Ultimately the module attempts to engage the reality of the city as a social, political, economic, material, spatial, environmental, and topological phenomenon questioning 鈥渨hat is the form of collective life?鈥� Building on term 1, term 2 explores a critical praxis for urban design and the transformation of local areas in development through a series of real case scenarios, challenging the dominant capitalist growth model and stimulating the students to define pathways for emancipation from the contemporary dynamics of commodification, seclusion and marginalisation of and within urban space.

This module is organised according to weekly teaching units, composed of weekly face-to-face encounters on campus (as indicated on the weekly DPU timetable) supported by readings and up to one-hour of asynchronous activities (including but not limited to short pre-recorded lectures) accessible on the module-specific Moodle page. Students are expected to dedicate approximately 150 learning hours per module per term, amounting to around 10-12 hours per week (for full-time students). The asynchronous activities will be released on a weekly basis via Moodle announcement, so you must keep pace with the module. Each required learning activity has a indicative amount of time to guide you. You are expected to participate actively in all module activities and your participation will be routinely monitored. Over the course of the module, each participant is expected to engage in the learning activities by drawing on the literature and on his/her personal and practical experience. Participants should read at least the core readings (provided electronically via Moodle) and complete all asynchronous activities for each teaching unit. This is a 30 credits module taught over term 1 and 2, with 9 weekly lecturers in each term.

Recalibrating Urban Design: what is the form of collective life?
Southern, planetary and in the margins
Space, power and knowledge
Reading Week
The camp and the paradigms of displacement
Politics, spaces and life
Care and its infrastructures
Bodies, spaces and the urban project
Extractions, excavations and dispossessions
Urban Design for collective living

Upon completion of the module, participants will be able to:
鈥� Be familiar with concepts of urban space in its inherently contested contemporary production and how different theoretical traditions have reflected critically on the urban as epistemological and ontological elements;
鈥� Understand the ways in which human activities shape and influence their environment and how the physical environment in turn affects and influences human activities;
鈥� Gain an overview with the critical debates on urban design, urban transformation and the role of the project in shaping and transforming spaces and places,
鈥� Appreciate the specific complexity of circumstances and constraints that urban design has to respond to in the context of contested urbanisms, informalities and neoliberal urban dynamics in planetary geographies and the ones of crisis, conflictive environments and global migration patterns;
鈥� Recognise different approaches to and definitions of urban design and understand the debate over urbanism and urbanisation across different epistemological traditions.
鈥� Have a critical framework to position urban design alongside architecture and planning informed an expanded tradition of philosophical and critical theory references.
鈥� To appreciate the necessity of a decolonial approach to urbanism and the need for an expanded reference (epistemological and geographical) to think and act on the urban spatial dimensions

鈥� Berlant, L, (2022) Introduction. Intentions, in Berlant, L., On the Incontinence of Other People, Durham, Duke University Press, pp:1-31
鈥� Kaiser, BM., Thiele, K., O鈥橪eary, T. (2021) Introduction, in Kaiser, BM., Thiele, K., O鈥橪eary, T. eds, The Ends of Critique. Methods, Institutions, Politics, Rowman and Littlefiled, London, pp:1-18
鈥� Simone, A. (2016), The Uninhabitable, Cultural Politics, 12 (2): 135-54.
鈥� Foucault, M., (2007) Lecture 11 January 1978, in M. Foucault, Security, Territory and Population, Lectures at the College De France 1977-78, London, Palgrave p. 1-27.
鈥� Kelly, M. E.G. (2014) Power and Resistance in Foucault and Politics. A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh University Press, pp: 85-113.
鈥� Shaw I, Waterstone M (2021) A Planet of Surplus Life: Building Worlds Beyond Capitalism. Antipode, 53: 1787-1806
鈥� Hi鈥榠lei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Kneese, T., (2020) Radical Care Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times, Social Text, Vol. 38(1,), pp: 1-16.
鈥� Tronto J., (2019) Caring Architecture, in A. Fitz, Krasny E., Arrchitekturzentrum Wien eds., Critical Care. Architecture and urbanism for a broken Planet. MIT press, pp: 26-32.
鈥� Gan E, Tsing, A (2018) 鈥淗ow Things Hold: A Diagram of Coordination in a Satoyama Forest.鈥� Social Analysis 62 (4): 102鈥�45.