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| Semester | fall semester 2017 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Virginia Nolan (virginia.nolan@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | What can architecture tell us about concepts of citizneship? During the last 250 years, minimal architectures have been understood, on the one hand, as providing the basic foundations of citizenship and cultural integration and, on the other hand, as instruments of biopolitical management which tend to reduce human existence to mere biological survival. These architectures—which include workers’ housing, rural villagization schemes, “informal” housing, emergency shelters, camps, and megastructural space-frames for “self-help” housing—can thus be understood as forming the basis of both politicization and de-politicization. Seeking to complicate the dichotomy Giorgio Agamben has drawn between “bare life” and “political life,” this course uses architecture as a way to unravel the entanglement of these two categories. Special attention will be given to how communications technologies have been conceived in co-operation with architecture as apparatuses of both political agency and biopolitical management, often with the specific intention of enfolding rural populations within schema of governmentality. Central to this interrogation will be issues of racial segregation, migration, and class. Covering a history of urban and rural planning during the past 250 years, we will begin by looking at British-colonial America and the early United States. As we move into the 20th century, will incorporate examples from around the globe. |
| Learning objectives | develop critical reading skills and techniques of comparison; learn to read political implications of architectural schemes; learn to use theoretical readings as tools to read histories against the grain and vice-versa. |
| Bibliography | The course will be framed through political philosophical works by: Hannah Arendt, Ètienne Balibar, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancére. In addition, we will read texts from history, architectural history, and urban history. The instructor will also give short lectures, showing visual material pertaining to the following histories: North American settler colonialism and the architectures of yeomanry and slavery • 18th- and 19th-century factory towns in Britain and the U.S.: riots, labor unrest, and unionization • architectures of U.S. Emancipation and the “Great Migration” from “40 acres and a mule” to the rise (and fall) of public housing and the creation of urban and rural poverty • 19th-c. utopian housing schemes for collective forms of life • Gender and domesticity: architectures of women’s work, late 19th to early 20th c. • European modernist housing and the concept of Existenzminimum (German and Soviet) • Rural planning in the global south: township planning in South Africa; villagization and model village schemes under British colonization: Malaya and Kenya, 1949-1960 and postcolonial villagization in Tanzania (ujamaas) • self-help housing in the global south, 1950’s-1970’s and the exportation of U.S. models of homeownership • collective forms of housing in 1960’s and 1970’s United States: co-operative movements in blighted neighborhoods, contemporaneous with counter-cultural commune back-to-the-land movements • “environmental citizenship” and ideas of environmental habiation • 21st-century model villages: Sri Lanka; Jeffrey Sachs’ “global villages” • privatization of squatters’ land; financialization of the slums; self-enumeration; and micro-credit • architectures of homelessness and incarceration • architectures of displaced persons |
| Admission requirements | None |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Course auditors welcome |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|
No dates available. Please contact the lecturer.
| Modules |
Modul Culture and Society (Master's degree program: African Studies (Start of studies before 01.08.2013)) Modul Fields: Environment and Development (Master's degree program: African Studies) Modul Fields: Governance and Politics (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: Projects and Processes of Urbanization (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | Pass/Fail |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Urban Studies |