Global Challenges – Local Responses: Exploring experimental approaches to urbanism in the global context
This course will be held in English !
Across the world, we see a rapid rise of alternative movements that are experimenting with, new lifestyles, new models of governance and new technologies. The aim of the seminar is to explore these experimental ways of thinking about urban ‘transformation’ in contemporary cities - both theoretically and practically. The seminar takes a multi-disciplinary view of global challenges like climate change, technological change, economic crisis, the rise of social inequalities or political shifts and how they are generating alternative and ‘transitional’ imaginaries of leading a “good life” (“buen vivir”) at the local level. With the help of these imaginaries, the seminar looks at the old question with new eyes: how cities can be governed or planned differently in order to become more sustainable, just and liveable? From a global perspective, this may require to rethink the role of urban planners and classical planning approaches commonly followed and applied in Europe.
The seminar will be based on reading and discussing theoretical texts in combination with diverse case studies of urban experiments from around the world. The case studies are discussed in a critical way, they are neither romanticized nor devalued, but understood in the context of their own ambivalences.
The course is open to all students interested in exploring alternative and ‘reflexive’ approaches in urban and spatial planning.