Urban Geography

"To Make the Colossus Tremble! Anarchist Geography and Spatial Emancipation" sets the stage for a radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. By embracing anarchist geographies as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for non-hierarchical connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging, we configure a political imagination that is capable of demanding the impossible. Experimentation in and through space is the story of humanity’s place on the planet, and the stasis and control that now supersedes ongoing organizing experiments is an affront to our very survival. Singular ontological modes that favor one particular way of doing things disavow geography by failing to understand the spatial as an ongoing mutable assemblage that is intimately bound to temporality. Even worse, such stagnant ideas often align to the parochial interests of an elite minority and thereby threaten to be our collective undoing. What is needed is the development of new relationships with our world, and crucially, with each other. By infusing our geographies with anarchism we unleash a spirit of rebellion that foregoes a politics of waiting for change to come at the behest of elected leaders, and instead engages new possibilities of mutual aid through direct action in the here and now. Anarchism is accordingly framed as a perpetually evolving process of geographical prefiguration that seeks to refashion entrenched modes of understanding and being in the world vis-à-vis the authoritarian institutions, proprietary relations, and pugnacious geopolitics that dominate contemporary political relations and their associated configurations of space. We can no longer accept the decaying, archaic geographies of hierarchy that chain us to statism, capitalism, gender domination, racial oppression, and imperialism. Instead, geography must become beautiful, wherein the entirety of its embrace is aligned to emancipation.

This course formulates and unearths a recounting of urban civilization across the historical and geographic spectrum of the Greek-speaking world, commencing from that world’s outset, deeply imbedded in myth at the beginnings of re-counted (hi)stories, and culminating with the emergence of a post-revolutionary Greece (early 19th c.) and a post-colonial Eastern Mediterranean.
Each of the in-class week parts focus on three cities representative of the period studied. Through the triangulated examination of urban myths and landscapes, of architectural and literary topographies, and of mutual influences, students receive as well as recreate and reflect upon a substantial and well-rounded vision of urban culture in the respective age.
The sessions consist of lectures on the topics presented, followed by reading and discussion sessions, consisting of oral and visual presentations and discussions on the corresponding assignments.

The Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space of Vienna University of Technology has opened a Call for Expression of  Interest for three one-year positions of the City of Vienna Visiting Professorship for Urban Culture and Public Space, successively appointed to three annual themes of the third funding phase (2015-2017) commencing in March 2015. Additional information can be obtained at the homepage of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space under the following link <http://skuor.tuwien.ac.at/en/professors/stiftungsgastprofessuren-2015-2017>. Deadline to submit Expression of Interest is 22 September 2014.

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. In India in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of  India's first smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. I argue first, that the smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that it highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in the smart city ‘speed’ is a relative term across its scales of manifestation from the global to local, where short ‘bursts of speed’ in conceptualisation and investment is matched by significant ‘bottlenecks’ via local protests. The paper concludes that the faultlines of the smart city are built into its utopian imaginings, which prioritises urbanization as a business model rather than a model of social justice.

In this paper I argue for an expansion of the horizons of urban geography through a notion of the intimate city. I focus on the slum as a space where a violence of an exclusionary city is woven into its intimate material and social conditions, but where this violence is also domesticated and rendered as part of the everyday. I illustrate through three stories of intimate lives of slum women that everyday life in the slum requires the production of a) an urban subject who shows agency not by resisting but by living with intimate violence b) an urban subjectivity involved in acquiring knowledge of one’s bodily terrain in order to limit this violence and c) a urban citizenship that argues for a ‘right to intimacy’ as a way to claim a right to the city. This paper calls for a recasting of the public/private divides in urban geography in order to understand how violence circulates through and contravenes the boundaries of public/private, city/slum, tradition/modernity.

Cet article s’efforce de comprendre comment l’habitant expérimente l’hétérogène naissant de la densité et de la diversité de l’urbain. Parmi les propositions classiques de l’expérience de l’hétérogène, on peut retenir que Simmel a proposé la figure du blasé, les situationnistes celle de la dérive. Partant de là, il s’agit de nuancer ces figures piégeuses : le blasé qui neutralise les différences, et la dérive qui les intensifient à l’extrême, les rendant invivables. Ces deux figures répulsives constituent deux pôles extrêmes d’expériences urbaines. De leur reprise se dégage peut-être une autre figure, celle du remix, qui lierait la capacité à expérimenter les différences et en même temps à maintenir un quotidien soutenable. Le remix est alors défini en tant que l’habitude du nouveau et du différent, habitude qui laisse l’esprit libre et réduit l’intensité de l’expérience. Apparaît alors l’importance de la répétition et du tri dans nos actions pour soutenir tant d’expériences et les ajustements variés de nos cours d’action. Des typologies en sont présentées, en fonction des lieux et des moments, des pratiques de mobilité. En découle une redéfinition de l’expérience de l’urbain contemporain par l’habitude du nouveau et une esthétique à même de renouveler notre regard sur l’expérience urbaine.

Key words:  Festival, Sacred, Music, Religion, Tourism, Performance
Festivals of world sacred music carve out a unique space in the sacred landscape. They afford participants the chance to try on certain self-identities and spiritualties within the tolerantly ambiguous pluralism of a post-modern, post-touristic sacred geography. With varying degrees of mediation and explanation, these festivals present the culturally and religiously specific for mass consumption.
We often speak of featured acts on a festival stage as “presentations of” a particular culture or religious tradition. This language reveals a poignant awareness of the extraordinary performative elements of festival. It also acknowledges the intensification of cultural and spiritual awareness that often occurs within this temporally and physically demarcated sphere.
The geography of world sacred music festivals poses related questions of authenticity. How does the festival present itself? Do producers construe the colorful costumes, attention to “authentic” performance details, and strong sense of communitas created by festival performance as encapsulating community ideals? Conversely, does the heightened attention to providing “authentic” performance become a contrived display intended for cultural outsiders and tourists? Categorizing an event as “overly religious and proselytizing,” “too pluralistic,” or an “incoherent conglomeration of spirituality” says as much about the commentator’s preconceived frame than the content of the festival itself. The various goals of these festivals in promoting arts agendas, highlighting ethnic minorities, proselytizing, worship, and increasing tourism shape their content and presentation.
Adding the element of sacred performance further complicates issues of performance authenticity. What are the implications when a festival advertises itself as a forum for spiritual discovery, as the majority of large international world sacred music festivals such as the Fes Festival do? How do featured artists present their music as related to the experience of the sacred? What is the impact of the festival frame in encouraging religious specificity while also encouraging an overarching atmosphere of spiritual pluralism that validates myriad individual approaches to the sacred?
Drawing upon interdisciplinary discourse running through performance studies, folklore, history, sociology, and ethnomusicology, I use the Fes Festival as a case study to show how sacred music festivals interrupt mundane geography to create poignant points of entrée into ecumenical spiritual experience. I first analyze how festivals problematize ethnographic musical objects as created, not found, through processes of detachment and contextualization. They situate musics and cultures in a time out of time, in a space out of space. In section two, I demonstrate how this forum of the sacred music festival impacts the function of the musics under presentation. I close with a discussion of the festival of world sacred music as navigating a post-tourist geography of the world’s sacred landscape. I demonstrate how the created festival product offers a condensed form of experience that the average tourists would likely not encounter on their own. With its intersection of tourism, festival, and sacred experience as special and removed from mundane, everyday realities, the festival of world sacred music has created a new spiritual destination within a globalizing world.

Urban wetlands are under serious threats. Rising land values and weak land administration in the urban areas of Ghana aggravate this problem. There have been incessant conflicts between the stakeholders in delineating and managing wetland areas.
This research therefore seeks to investigate the political ecology of urban wetlands in Kumasi, Ghana in relation to the definition and delineation of urban wetland areas. The soil, vegetation and drainage conditions of some flood prone suburbs of Kumasi were studied. Questionnaire survey and focus group discussions were used to collect and collate the characteristics, reasons, conditions and experiences of residents of flood prone suburbs of Kumasi. It was found that the houses in these neighbourhoods were built in wetland areas. The nature and type of soil, vegetation and the waterlogged conditions of these
suburbs proved them to be wetlands. However, the land ownership system is an impediment to the successful management of these wetlands by the city authorities. The study concludes that the right definition and delineation of wetlands will not solve the problem of people building in wetland areas in Kumasi and Ghana as a whole. The city authorities should not only delineate wetlands but also acquire the area, put it to sustainable use and share the benefits with the land owners.

Miami is a « swing city » between the North and the South of the American continent : El dorado
for many people from the Caribbean and Latin America it also serves as a fresh concrete slab to
gain for speculators and developers from all walks of life. This city, which recently emerged in the hierarchy of American cities, concentrates heterogeneous populations with a diverse array of urban
practices and representations of the city. Since the 1960s and the victory of Castro’s revolution, Miami is the theater of incessant migrations and a remarkable urban sprawl extending the agglomeration to the South and the West of the county. In this very weakly planned urban area, the rapid urban changes (demographic and economic) question the current processes of urban «distancing»: segregation and fragmentation. In this article, we try to understand how intense circulations that drive the city played in the advent of spatial, social and affective distances characteristic of Miami