In this seminar we will discuss different perspectives on the urban. Urban researchers from various disciplines report on their current research projects – in the classroom or on a walk in Zurich. Supplemented by text reading, we discuss together the different approaches and perspectives on the urban as a field of research.
The aim of the course is to bring together different perspectives on the urban in a cross-disciplinary seminar. The participants will gain an in-depth overview of the broad field of urban research. They are able to fundamentally understand and classify different research approaches.
On the basis of guest lectures and preparatory text reading, we discuss across disciplines the field of urban research. In addition to lectures, there are also on-site visits.
Amidst raging debates on new epistemologies of the urban, this session, in taking its cue from sociocultural anthropology, considers the need for an ontological approach to urban studies for a more radical reckoning of the multiplicity and alterity of urban worlds. Such a shift entails not only efforts to gain deeper understandings of different realities, but addresses the tension of holding incompatible urban experiences together in a comparative perspective.
While this resonates with arguments within urban studies to provincialise EuroAmerican perspectives, this intriguing possibility of decolonising urban theory through an ontological turn requires critical scrutiny. In asking how such an enquiry is distinct from existing (epistemological) analyses into the constitution of the urban, this session would like to explore moves embracing the incommensurability of different urban worlds, opening up empirical possibilities for dialogical approaches and distinct ways of understanding social realities.
In proposing to focus on the city as an important site of ontological intervention, we invite papers to reflect on accompanying challenges:
SPECIFICITY AND DIFFERENCE: How do we tackle the specificity of the city and its predilection for incommensurability? When cities such as Delhi evoke their own platform for urban experiences, how can we justify the use of broad analytical filters within urban studies such as “informal urbanism” that seek to transcend and compromise these differing realities in all their otherness?
DECOLONISING METHODS: What are the methodological registers that allow translation of concepts alien to the conventional urban analytic without marginalising the worlds from which they emanate? Equally, as ontologies can only be grasped through comparison as contingent variations of one another (both North/South and South/South), and are often entangled, what kind of methodologies allow the study of dissimilar and uncommon singular realms without the overarching reference of ‘the urban’?
ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORISATION: In endorsing an ontological pursuit of “knowledge practice”, how do we engage with the idea of the city as ethnography? Moreover, how can ethnographic representations of the urban help to acknowledge ontological difference, privileging more vernacular conceptualisations (e.g. jugaad urbanism), and putting them into conversation?
Stream organized by Pushpa Arabindoo and Monika Streule at the RC21 conference, Delhi 2019
This paper seeks to respond to the growing prominence of post- and decolonial thoughts in the field of urban studies and the methodological consequences this critical engagement brings to the fore. Focusing on the entangled and relational character of urbanization, established concepts and more orthodox methodologies have to be rethought, revised, and rebuilt. In this context, the paper highlights the particular importance of methods in regard to comparative urbanism – given the openness and interdisciplinary character of the field itself – and invites to reflect on collaborative, dialogical and experimental ways of knowledge production across different urban worlds.
To this end, the paper places critical cartography and mapping tools both at the centre of attempts to understand and represent urbanization and as conceptual space to rethink comparative methodologies in urban studies more broadly. Taking the reflection on decolonizing methods as a starting point to collaboratively rethink the potentials and constraints mapping harbours for a critical urban research agenda and as a valuable tool to understand urbanisation as a dynamic, open ended and contested process of global transformation.
Paper presented at the Session Building new concepts in urban studies: Challenges and tactics in comparative urbanism, AAG Annual Meeting 2019, April 3–7, Washington DC
Ethnography of urban territories seeks to comprehend transformations of the spatial dimension of society. Hence, to understand urban phenomena as a social process, it introduces territory as a particularly qualified notion to study and apprehend the contemporary urban condition of Mexico City, asking: What kind of urbanization processes can be identified on the metropolitan territory of Mexico City? And, how can they be explained? Which main subjects are involved in the production of the urban? How are such urbanization processes inscribed in the terrain?
Following calls to decentralize and pluralize both the theories of urban studies and the modes of knowledge production, the book deals with these questions in theoretical and methodological ways. This leads to the question of how such an ambitious research of metropolitan scale can be performed in a qualitative-empirical way. Confronted today with intensifying, concentrating and extending urbanization processes at all spatial scales and across multifarious urban contexts and everyday realities, the explicitly transdisciplinary approach of urban ethnography is a particularly adept mode to produce knowledge about current social, political and economic transformations.
Empirically grounded, based on extended ethnographic fieldwork, and developed in conversation with other urban everyday realities in the framework of a broader comparative project, the book entangles everyday experience on the street-level with socio-territorial relations on a metropolitan scale. Thus, it suggests a novel way of thinking about urban transformation in a multi-sited, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal perspective. In this respect, the book is deliberately moving beyond a single case study.
Finally, by developing, employing and reflecting on experimental methodologies like Mobile Ethnography, Qualitative Mapping, and the Periodization of Urbanization Regimes, the book demonstrates how a postcolonial perspective on urban processes radically and effectively alters the scientific approach towards the urban. If urban theory is to be both provisional and revisable, it is key to foreground the role of the corresponding methodological strategies. Thus, integrating theory, method, synthesis and reflection, the book demonstrates how methodological innovations are both influenced by and formative of a decentered urban theory. As such, the book offers essential links for further investigations in the field of urban studies in general, and particularly for the analysis of different urban contexts in a comparative perspective.
Ethnografie urbaner Territorien. Metropolitane Urbanisierungsprozesse von Mexiko-Stadt. (2018) aus der Reihe Raumproduktionen: Theorie und gesellschaftliche Praxis Band 32. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.
