Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An exploration of how race informs the aesthetics, politics and development of urban space. Examines racial formation in transnational urban contexts, and how cultural production and social movements are utilized to address racial inequities and envision urban futures.

COURSE DETAILS:

Structural inequalities are embedded into the landscape of cities. Who lives where, what access residents have to resources, and who experiences excessive policing are spatial circumstances that are deeply racialized. In this course we will explore how race informs urban space by thinking through contemporary issues such as gentrification, incarceration and policing, and housing access.

We will think intersectionally to reveal how cultural production, protest, and social organizing shape cities and envision more-just futures. We will look to academic and creative texts, as well as toward moments of political organizing in cities to build an understanding of how cities are racialized, gendered and always being contested.

Some questions we will explore throughout the semester are:

• How does the erasure and dispossession of Indigenous peoples facilitate the development of cities?
• How have Black and migrant communities been continually devalued across North America, fueling the dispossession of their homes over time?
• How does gentrification stem from these longer histories of dispossession and what forms does gentrification take?
• How has mass incarceration become normalized over the last 50 years and how is the prison industrial complex used to ‘solve’ urban problems?
• How do social movements respond to urban problems and what radical futures are being built in cities across the continent?

There will be tutorials the first week of class.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: