Urban Studies

The course focuses on mapping and listening to acoustic territories in Berlin. It allows academic research for exploring and understanding the city by sensing aural environments. Structured in theory and practice, the central questions of the course are: Which sonic elements can we encounter in navigating historical and contemporary maps? Which methods of research and practices exist in the act of mapping with sound? How can we generate sound maps? From a transdisciplinary approach, the course reflects the city‘s cultural, social, and political dimensions through analyzing and creating maps by listening. It aims to allow students to explore auditory territories, gain strength, and develop knowledge and individual perspective on cultural studies and urban studies. The mapping methods are practice-based on field recordings, soundwalk, and sound diagramming exercises. The academic readings and discussions introduce the student to the field of sound studies.

The cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries surged with light, money, ideas, and people. New aspects of city life included the arrival of electric modes of mass transit, new technologies of communication, luminous arcades filled with consumer goods, and opulent palaces for commercial entertainment. Successive waves of newcomers sought a better life amidst the bright lights, swelling the cities with restless endeavor. Photographers, artists, poets, journalists and others looked to capture this era of rapid urban change, and make sense of the metropolitan spaces unfolding outwards and upwards before them. Where there was illumination there was also shadow. Amidst the dazzling opportunities offered by the metropolis could also be found its benighted citizens, those whom fortune did not favor. Outcasts and malcontents shared the city’s public spaces, from time to time terrorizing middle-class imaginations. It is this tension of extremes – between the city filled with prospects and the city as the terminus of hope – that this course explores. Focusing on four cities where the possibilities and pitfalls of modernity were felt especially keenly, weekly readings and discussions seek to comprehend what it was like to experience profound transformations in urban living. Rather than try to understand the four case study cities in totality across more than half a century, the course offers specific excursions into the social and cultural histories of London, Melbourne, New York, and Paris. 

Faraway and everyday landscape typologies shape human inhabitations, as well as cosmogonies, cosmologies, myths, and folklore of different cultures. These spaces are sometimes the place of conquests, other times the place of retreat; sometimes regarded with fear, other times with fascination. The same landscape typologies can be the archetypical images of inhabitation, and the archetypical images of abandonment. This course unfolds some of the meanings of landscape through the lenses of abandonment and inhabitation, shedding light over the pertinence of some concepts in particular historical periods and the cause of their oblivion in others, for example, concepts of nature and environment; wilderness and sublime; or landscape urbanism, social urbanism, or informal urbanism.

 

This course analyzes the complexity of "wicked" problems - problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because of their complex and interconnected nature. The course epxlores a system of metrics to assess the appropriateness of transition design and social design interventions The second part of the course explores the transition design framework as it was proposed by scholars of at The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, one of many useful frameworks for understanding how positive socio-ecological change can be constructed. The course concludes with a discussion of concepts like cosmopolitan localism and inter-localisation that promise a positive way forward towards forming more empowered, resilient communities in an age of intensifying planetary crises.

This course uses London to explore how contemporary cities are being theorized, experienced, and understood. Consideration is given to how cities are conceptualized in and through the context of globalization. The concept of "global cities" is to be contrasted with perspectives that emphasize the "ordinary" quality of cities, to allow students to engage analytically and critically with the complexities and diversities of urban life and experiences. A range of interdisciplinary themes within urban studies are employed to explore the diverse socio-spatial and cultural dynamics and practices both with respect to London and to students' home cities.

This course is a study of countryside planning and the contemporary issues, functions, and conflicts of different landscapes, ranging from traditional rural to peri-urban settings. The course examines cultural landscapes, local, national and international policy, planning processes, governance, actor analysis, EU physical planning approaches, landscape analysis and multifunctional landscapes, nature and water management, recreation, cultural heritage, national parks, rural development programs, agricultural diversification and social farming, peri-urban agriculture, counter-urbanization, and rural-urban relationships.