OVERVIEW

On behalf of a sociological perspective, the course will explores the main cultural, political, and economic processes of transformation affecting contemporary city, addressing their specific, social and territorial effects. Main aim is to build up a kind of social map of the uneven urban spaces, by outlining the different ways and conditions of living and dwelling them, the boundaries crossing and redefining them, and the social differences they reflect and/or directly produce.

AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims at providing students with critical tools and theoretical and practical/descriptive competences in order to read and detect urban transformation processes. 

LEARNING OUTCOMES (FURTHER INFO)

In conceiving urban space as a kind of specific “text”, main aim of the course is to fostering students’ critical consciousness and providing them with a different and deeper gaze on uneven urban landscape and the different ways of living and dwelling it.

TEACHING METHODS

The course will be articulated in two different moments: a first and more extended one, whose character is mainly theoretical and organized on frontal lectures, where to outline the main issues at stake in current urban studies, by presenting different sociological and ethnographic theoretical and research approaches; a second, shorter one, organized as a workshop and  based on reading  groups  on texts provided by the teacher, where to outline collective researches on specific urban sites and practices through the methodological approaches developed by social ethnography.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

On behalf of the critical perspective developed in the fields of the sociology of cultural processes and of urban studies, the course will outline the main traits of global contradictory urbanization processes: from the spread of urbanized territories to the multiplication of internal boundaries, from urban sprawl to gentrification processes, from the new policies of control and security and forms of conflicts involving urban space to the growth of informal and peripheral spaces within the cities. On behalf of these assumptions, a series of sites and situations will be detected where to develop specific collective researches and investigations on the different way of living and dwelling urban spaces.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basic texts: S. Sassen, Cities in World Economy, Sage: New York 2014; 2010; M. Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso: London - New York  2006;

One among: A. Coppola, Apocalypse  town, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011;  D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso: London - New York 2013;; M. Guareschi, F. Rahola Forme della città. Sociologia dell’urbanizzazione, Agenzia X, Milano 2015; A. Petrillo Peripherein, Franco Angeli, Milano 2014; S. Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Place;  Oxford University Press: New York 2010.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

FEDERICO RAHOLA (President)

GABRIELLA PETTI

LESSONS

LESSONS START

March 2017

Class schedule

SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURAL PROCESSES

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

Attending students have to participate to reading groups and, at the end of the course, to make an individual or collective presentation discussing a research autonomously realized whose argument will be established together with teacher; as an alternative, they may take an oral or written test concerning the arguments of the course and the  recommended books . Non-attending students will have to take a written exam on recommended books.

ASSESSMENT METHODS

Both in case of individual or collective presentations of specific researches, and in case of a speech, the exam will verify student’s appropriate knowledge and comprehension of the main social and spatial dynamics at stake in global urbanization processes, attesting his/her ability to read with a critical gaze the transformation processes investing urban territories and experience.

Exam schedule