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| Semester | spring semester 2024 |
| Course frequency | Every spring sem. |
| Lecturers |
Laura Nkula Wenz (laura.nkula@unibas.ch, Assessor)
Anna Selmeczi (anna.selmeczi@unibas.ch) |
| Content | The City Immersions course consists of two components: 1. The City Research Studio, a field-research based project that focused on understanding differential access to housing and basic services in Cape Town. It is run in collaboration with a Cape Town NGO – People’s Environmental Planning (PEP), this research will build your experience in engaging with the everyday lived realities of housing and service delivery in informal settlements through collaborative and qualitative research. This year’s studio will be based in a cluster of four small informal settlements, located in Khayelitsha neighbourhood of Cape Town. The studio takes place at a strategic moment: PEP has recently started working in these settlements and is very keen to develop and implement service delivery projects in as many of these settlements as possible. 2. Experimenting with Publics, which provides a practical space to explore and research Cape Town city publics, the spaces and places which people inhabit, live daily lives, and build the city. Through participation and engagement with particular Cape Town publics we will experiment with participatory and embodied research practice and writing. The module’s aim is to look into the raced, gendered, classed, and otherwise segmented allocation of the city’s images, movements, sounds, smells, tastes and tactilities and how these shift and morph. What ideas of good urban life and the ideal urban dweller can be read off of the ways in which the design and regulation of city spaces invite or disallow particular aesthetic experiences and particular mobilities? How and where do we find sense experiences that offer alternative ideas of belonging and modes of being together? And, how do we ‘know’ and research through embodied forms of research practice, through ‘sensing’ and ‘moving’ (with) our bodies? |
| Learning objectives | For Part I: City Research Studio In the six CRS sessions, which make up part 1, you will have the opportunity to engage with the complexity of housing policy and its implementation in impoverished neighbourhood contexts in Cape Town. The CRS Part 1/City Immersions Part 1 offers an exciting and demanding context in which to learn and engage with housing struggles and the lived experiences of housing policy. Please give it your all as it is a unique context to engage with housing issues in practice and to reflect on collaborative approaches to research in southern cities. By the end of the CRS, you will have experimented with and reflected on different forms of qualitative interviewing city residents, engaged experientially and conceptually with different elements of the housing debate in South African cities, worked in collaboration with NGOS and their partners in neighbourhoods, and reflected on the ways in which this collaborative work shapes research purpose and form. For Part II: Experimenting with Publics Experimenting with Publics explores arts-based methods of reading, exploring and representing the city and encourages students to reflect on the city as an aesthetic order; an order that is made up of layered patterns that define the distribution of sense experience among those who inhabit and traverse urban space. In other words, its aim is to look into the raced, gendered, classed, and otherwise segmented allocation of the city’s images, movements, sounds, smells, tastes and tactilities and how these shift and morph. In turn, it asks what conceptions of the ‘public’ give shape to these patterns of distribution. The studio is co-facilitated by artists and art practitioners and it invites students on an explorative/investigative journey through a series of arts based methodologies with the aim of drawing provocative, experimental and surprising links with urban studies and practice. It seeks to foreground the importance of humanities-based methodologies in deepening a qualitative understanding of urban spatial dynamics and invention. |
| Admission requirements | Anmelden: Belegen; Abmelden: nicht erforderlich This course is only open to students of the Critical Urbanisms MA program. Further conditions: successful completion of the Critical Urbanisms Introduction course and admission to the Urbanisms from the South Track. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|
No dates available. Please contact the lecturer.
| Modules |
Module: Ways of Knowing the City (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | as often as necessary |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Urban Studies |