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.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course aims at providing students with a series of theoretical tools and practical-descriptive skills to read and interpret the transformations affecting contemporary cities, particularly focusing on their social and territorial impact. Assuming the urban space as a sort of stratified text over time, the main goal pf the curse is to foster in the students a critical awareness of the historical, political and social dynamics that shape the cities and territories we inhabit, redefining their experience and form itself. .

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.

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

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

Starting from the critical perspective developed by both the sociology of cultural processes and urban studies, the course will outline the basic characteristics of urbanization processes: from the explosion of the urbanized territory to the fragmentation of the territorial city, from sprawl to the dynamics of gentrification, from new forms of social control and conflict to the proliferation of peripheral and informal areas. The aim consists in builiding up a map of the set of heterogeneous spaces intowhere the shape of the city appears to fall apart, by bringing out the borders that cross and segment it, the social and economic dynamics they are an expression of, and the different material conditions and inequalities these borders in turn reflect and generate. On behalf of these assumptions, they will be identified a series of specific places and situations characterized by a particular dissonance or discrepancy, whereto carry out a collective or individual research work aimed at exploring the different ways of living and experiencing the city.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basic texts: S. Sassen, Cities in World Economy, Sage: New York 2014; 2010; D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso: London - New York 2013;

One among: A. Coppola, Apocalypse  town, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2011; M. Guareschi, F. Rahola Forme della città. Sociologia dell’urbanizzazione, Agenzia X, Milano 2015; S. Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Place;  Oxford University Press: New York 2010, H. Lefebvre, The right to the city, Oxford 1996.

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

LESSONS

LESSONS START

Second semester/March 2026

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

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.