By 2050, 68% of the world population will live in cities, making the city, a particular kind of settlement, the dominant way of spatially organising livelihoods and communities. This module explores anthropological approaches to the study of the city, showing how ethnographers have investigated the urban as a place characterised by and as a site of experiencing often contradictory forms of togetherness and interconnectedness, exclusion and segregation. We will question the place of the urban in anthropological thinking and discuss whether anthropologists have carried out an anthropology of the city or an anthropology in the city. The module will cover themes such as ethnographies of marginality and urban economies, popular culture and urban lifestyle, architecture and the built environment, infrastructure and global flows of capital in order to guide students through multiple meanings and experiences of the urban. Students will develop an understanding of how power dynamics, inequalities, identities and aesthetics shape how individuals and communities live, act, and imagine the future in cities.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Summarise and critically evaluate key and central arguments in urban theory and urban anthropology
Locate ethnographic explorations of urban life in comparative and theoretical debates about identity, agency, everyday life, power and place.
Explain and critically assess how inclusion and exclusion shape experiences of the urban Describe, examine and analyse local notions of the urban and how they shape individual and collective experiences of the social and the political
Assessment
31887-01 : Book Review - 1500 word essay - Essay 1 : Coursework (40%)
31887-02 : 2500 word essay - Essay 2 : Coursework (60%)
Assessment Methods & Exceptions
Assessment: 1 x 1500 word written assignment (40%)