LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims at providing students with conceptual and analytical tools in order to critically reading the socio-economic, cultural and communication processes investing contemporary society and urban experience.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims at providing students with a whole series of  both conceptual and descriptive tools to outline and detect the main transformative processes involving contemporary cities.

Particularly, through attending lectures, engaging in collective researches and individually studying, students will be able to:  

• recognize the main (social, economic, and cultural) processes affecting contemporary urban experience;
• critically assess a whole dynamics of transformation (form urbanization, to postindustrial and post-fordist transition, and the primacy of symbolic economies, from processes of gentrification, privatization of spaces, growing of informal and peripheral areas, to the new security ) that are globally reshaping the form of the city;
• outline and analyze the uneven local impact and the spatial effects of such transformation.

PREREQUISITES

Basic knowledge of the main sociological theories and reserach approaches

TEACHING METHODS

The course is conceived as splitted in two different moments: a first and more extended one, mainly theoretical and organized on frontal lectures, even recurring to images and visual documents, where to outline the main issues at stake in contemporary urban studies; 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. 

The course will be held face to face in the classroom, except for any possible resurgence of the pandemic emergency that will require the return to the DAD on the Teams platform. Attending students will be provided with reading texts and supplementary material through aulaweb.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

According to the intertwined perspectives developed in the fields of urban studies, sociology of cultural processes, and communication social theories, the course will outline a series of dynamics characterizing the current, globalized and contradictory urbanization processes. By firstly focusing on homologizing processes (urban sprawl, postfordist transition, gentrification dynamics, real estate market, symbolic economy, cultural policies, big events), the attention will be therefore devoted to the backstage of the official image of the city, focusing on the multiplication of urban boundaries as well as of residual places apparently excluded from these processes, such as informal spaces, vacant lots and terrain vagues.  On behalf of these assumptions, a series of sites and situations will be detected where to develop specific collective researches and investigations.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basic texts: 

U. Rossi, A. Vanolo, Geografia politica urbana, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2010;

M. Guareschi, F. Rahola, Forme della città. Sociologia dell’urbanizzazione, Agenzia X, Milano 2015

Further texts - one to be chosen among:

D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso: London - New York 2013;

S. Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Place;  Oxford University Press: New York 2010

A. Coppola, Apocalypse town, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011;

H. Lefebvre, Il diritto alla città, Ombre corte, Verona 2015.

L. Queirolo Palmas, F. Rahola, Underground Europe. Lungo le rotte migranti, Meltemi, Milano 2020 (Chapters 1 and 2).