الربيع ٢٠٢٣، القاهرةمختبر

Space lab: Un-building: Urbanization and the Geographies of Extraction

التسجيل مغلق

تفاصيل المقرر

الدورة: الربيع ٢٠٢٣، القاهرة
المدة: ١١ أسبوعًا
طريقة الحضور: حضوري / مدمج
لغة التدريس: الإنجليزية

ناقشه مع الذكاء الاصطناعي

اختر مساعد الذكاء الاصطناعي الذي تفضّله.
ستُفتح علامة تبويب جديدة، وستجد النص التوجيهي جاهزًا للاستخدام.
اضغط على إرسال لتبدأ استكشاف الصفحة من خلال الحوار، على طريقة سيلاس.

عن المقرر

This lab explores how urbanization transforms the earth by (re)centering the “hinterland” question in the study of urbanization and cities. Together we will seek to develop a processual and metabolic understanding of urbanization in which we connect the dynamics of city-building to the (often-concealed) cascade of non-city geographies, such as: sites of extraction, industrial agriculture, deforestation, logistics, population displacement and waste disposal - that are deeply entangled in the violent dynamics of capitalist urban expansion. We will ask how do cities, and city-building processes, involve the continuous remaking of (nonhuman) environments and landscapes beyond the actual boundaries of the city. In what ways are such transformations ecologically destructive? And most importantly, for whom?

Focusing particularly on “extractivism”; this lab will explore the extractive nature of late-capitalist urban expansion and its construction industry. Studying a number of specific building materials in the Egyptian construction industry– such as granite, glass, concrete, steel, etc. – we will explore some of the different sites of extraction, supporting infrastructural and logistical networks, and value chains that are implicated in recent urban expansion processes, as well as the human and non-human lifeworlds entangled within these processes. The lab will include several seminar-like discussions, guest speakers, and a group project that will culminate into a series of investigations of supply chains of different construction materials.

Project description:

Groups of 2-3 participants.

Each group will pick a specific construction material by the fourth week of the course to focus their research on. The projects can focus on different sites of extraction, infrastructures, value chains, and/or can follow some of the entanglements of specific human or non-human work/energy flows. The final output can be a written paper or a multimedia project. In the latter approach, lab participants can choose a mode of communication that differs from written essays, such as a map, visual essay, a podcast, etc. Final projects will be presented during the final week of classes.

Interested participants can continue to develop their projects during the summer along with the course instructor for a final exhibition and/or publication that is part of a longer “urbanization and ecology” research project.

مَن يقدّم المقرر

Salma Abouelhossein is a PhD candidate in urban studies and planning at Harvard university. She is broadly interested in the changing geographies and ecologies of capitalist urbanization, postcolonial development planning, and ‘the hinterland question’ in urban studies. Her PhD project studies the history of sugar towns in the south of Egypt and their sugarcane producing agrarian hinterlands. Discussing what she (tentatively) calls “anticolonial hinterlands”, the research shows how planning the agrarian hinterland was central to postcolonial development planning and its decolonization project during the 1950s and 1960s - and how the afterlives of these anticolonial hinterlands continue to shape contemporary market-led urbanization.

مسار المقرر

يُعرض ١١ جلسة

جلسات بلا تاريخ

- Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories in Material Movement.Hutton, Jane Elizabeth. London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
- egy-map.comCheck the following websites. Title taken from the address; the visible link text was not in the extracted text.
- beyond_cement_0.pdf (publicworksstudio.com)Check the following websites. Title taken from the address; the visible link text was not in the extracted text.
- design-earth.org/exhibitionsCheck the following websites. Title taken from the address; the visible link text was not in the extracted text.
- feralatlas.orgCheck the following websites. Title taken from the address; the visible link text was not in the extracted text.
- youtube.com/@wizy82/videosCheck the following websites. Title taken from the address; the visible link text was not in the extracted text.
- The natural history of urbanizationMumford, Lewis. In William T. Thomas ed., Man’s Role in the Changing Face of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, 382-400.
- Operational Landscapes: Hinterlands of the Capitalocene.Brenner, Neil, and Nikos Katsikis. Architectural Design 90, no. 1 (2020): 22–31.
- Introduction: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism.Moore, Jason W. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, 1–13. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.
- The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory.Wolford, Wendy. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, February 11, 2021, 1–18. (optional)
- Reflections on the Plantationocene: a conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna TsingPodcast.
- Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.Foster, John Bellamy. American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–405.
- Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective.Moore, Jason W. Organization & Environment 13, no. 2 (June 2000): 123–57.
- Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State.Bunker, Stephen G. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. (Chapters 1 and 2)
- Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays.Brenner, Neil. Bauwelt Fundamente 156. Gütersloh : Basel: Bauverlag ; Birkhäuser, 2017. (Selected sections: p. 186 – 223)
- Metabolic Urbanization: The Making of Cybrog Cities.Swyngedouw, E. In In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, edited by Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw, 21–40. Questioning Cities Series. London ; New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Cities or Urbanization?Harvey, David. City 1, no. 1–2 (January 1996): 38–61.
- Anti-capitalist chroniclesPodcast by David Harvey. Listen to: ‘Dumping Surplus Capital’ and ‘The Urbanization of China’.
- The urbanization of capitalDavid Harvey. In The Urban Experience. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989, 17-58. Alternatively to the podcast above.
في الجلسة
نقاشReflections and Projects discussion 1
- Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.Cronon, William. 3. print. New York: Norton, 1992.
في الجلسة
عرض تقديميGuest speaker: About Concrete (TBC)
- The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
- feralatlas.orgCheck out (Week 8). Title taken from the address; the visible link text was not in the extracted text.
- Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism.Arboleda, Martín. Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020.
- Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions.McMichael, Philip. Agrarian Change & Peasant Studies 2. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2013.
- يد خفية #14: السيادة على الغذاءPodcast. Title rebuilt by hand from the reversed Arabic text layer (not checked against the page image); verify before use.
في الجلسة
عرض تقديميGuest speaker: TBC
- Geographies of Trash.Ghosn, Rania, and El Hadi Jazairy. New York ; Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2015.