Minor Globalization and Development

Course code: MGD3001 
Course Period: 2 ECTS 
Credits of this course: 12

Full course description 

Each year and all over the world, millions of people move to cities. But what does urbanization look like in the Global South? 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, 2010, 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 in the Global South. 

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 takes as a starting point the question what it takes to live and survive in a city when one is very poor, marginalized, silenced, made invisible, 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 examine the ways in which people navigate, resist, and shape the cities where they live. Cities are approached as historically constituted – often rooted in colonial histories – as well as shaped by present practices and future imaginaries. At the same time, they are not self-contained spaces, but sites that connect transnational movements and mobilities of people, capital, and goods. The course focuses on the following themes: Cities as windows onto worlds; Human and nonhuman infrastructures; Making a living; Digital infrastructures from below; Counter-geographies of globalization; Identity and cultural production; Cityness.

Course objectives At the end of this course, students: 

• can understand and analyze approaches to urban poverty from below, particularly as they emerge in cities in the Global South; 
• can conceptualize and discuss the work it takes for the urban poor to survive in cities; 
• can conceptualize and discuss the contribution of the urban poor to cities; 
• can produce a narrative of agency; o are able to analyze, understand, and critically apply relevant theoretical and analytical approaches to examine how the urban poor live, survive in and shape cities.