Urban Development & Poverty in the 21st Century

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Each year and all over the world, millions of people move to cities. But who are the winners and the losers in these processes of global change? This course frames ‘the city’ as “a heuristic space – a space capable of producing knowledge about some of the major transformations of an epoch” (Sassen, 2012, p. 1) and as a lens through which to acquire knowledge about development and poverty in our globally interconnected and troublesome world.

Through readings in this course we delve into the human aspects of these contrasting and contradictory spaces, and we analyze social, economic and political processes in cities of particularly less/differently developed countries. We discuss connections and tensions between urban communities and economic development; the creation of vulnerable populations through urbanization and the precariousness of labour; the structural failures of slum ecologies and how they affect people; and also how citizens nevertheless find myriad modes of making the city their home.

Fundamentally, this course departs from the question what it takes to live and survive in a city when one is very poor, marginalized, silenced, made invisible, patronized, or otherwise rendered peripheral. We take such qualifications to be effects of not only how cities are organized and governed 'from above', but also of specific ways of conceptualizing how cities and their inhabitants operate. Key to our point of departure is the notion, coined by Simone (2010) of ‘cityness’, “the city as a thing in the making (…) [where] at the heart of city life is the capacity for its different people, spaces, activities, and things to interact in ways that exceed any attempt to regulate them” (Simone, 2010, p. 3). Thus, we look at the constrains the urban poor are facing, but also at the opportunities people have to make a living and contribute crucially to what cities are.