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The global city and the nature of the urban: Anthropological perspectives Readings and lecture titles for PhD course, Paris, 4-7 May 2020 Organizers: Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Knut Rio, University of Bergen

Image: The high-rises of Maputo as seen from its periphery

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1) Organization of lectures and readings

There are five lectures already planned for the PhD course. The relevant themes and literature for each of these—which participants are meant to have familiarized themselves with—are listed below.

On page seven, there is a list of books. Participants are also expected to have read one (1) of these prior to the course as well as to have seen the lecture and listened to the podcast listed on the same page.

This list may be changed slightly prior to the seminar, and if so, participants will be informed well in time before May 2020.

Image: Birdseye view of Haussmann’s Paris.

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2) Lectures, themes and readings

Yasmeen Arif

City – Aesthetic To help us anchor the idea, we make use of Susan Buck-Morss’ etymology of the Greek idea of aisthitikos – the original Greek work for that which is “perceptive by feeling”. As she writes, “The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality – corporeal, material nature.” How do we recognize the contemporary sense of ‘city-reality/aesthetics’ as it appears in the conjunction of bodies/politics/matter/technologies?

Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure”. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42: 327–43. Thibaud, Jean-Paul. 2015. “The backstage of urban ambiances: when atmospheres pervade everyday experience”. Emotions, Space and Society, Elsevier, 39-46. Available at https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01560172/document Gandy, Matthew. 2005. “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(1): 26-49. Gandy, Matthew. 2013. “Marginalia: Aesthetics, Ecologies and Urban Wastelands”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(6): 1301-1316. Gandy, Matthew. 2107. “Urban Atmospheres”. Cultural Geographies. 24(3): 353- 374. Whybrow, Nicolas. 2105. “‘The City of the Eye’: Urban Aesthetics and Surveillance in the City of Venice”. New Theatre Quarterly. 31(02): 164-178. Sennet, Richard. 1996. Flesh and Stone: The Body and City in Western Civilization. W.W. Norton. (Introduction and the chapter on Venice). Choy, Timothy. 2012. “Air’s Substantiations”. In Kaushik Sunder Rajan (ed.), Lively Capital. Duke University Press.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01560172/document

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Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Territorializing and de-territorializing the urban

What dynamics and forces contribute to produce urban orders—i.e. territories? And what modes of engagement unsettles or (sometimes fleetingly) reshapes these orders—i.e. de-territorializes them? In this lecture, a range of territorializing and re-reterritorializing dynamics will be broached, including also a discussion of methodological choices for approaching the urban.

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2014. “Effervescence and ephemerality: Popular urban uprisings in Mozambique”. Ethnos 81(1): 25-52, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2014.929596

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. Forthcoming. “A lesser human? Utopic specters of urban reconfiguration in Maputo, Mozambique”. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.

Boeck, Filip de. 2015. “‘Divining’ the city: rhythm, amalgamation and knotting as forms of ‘urbanity’”. Social Dynamics 41(1): 47-58.

Devisch, René. 1995. “Frenzy, violence, and ethical renewal in Kinshasa”. Public culture 7: 593-629.

Graham, Stephen. 2010. Cities under Siege. The New Military Urbanism. London and New York: Verso. (Read chapter 1).

Quayson, Ato. 2014. Oxford Street, Accra: City life and the itineraries of transnationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. (Read chapter 1).

Ukah, Asonzeh. 2016. “Building God's City: The Political Economy of Prayer Camps in Nigeria”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(3): 524–540.

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Sian Lazar

Protests and space

In this lecture, I explore how urban protest creates the city and vice versa. Protests – street marches, riots, occupations – are experiential and aesthetic acts on and in public space, which appropriate and create the city. The city also shapes protest, through its topology and physicality as much as through government and politics.

Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2015. “Social Movements, Cultural Production, and Protests: São

Paulo’s Shifting Political Landscape”. Current Anthropology 56(S11): S126-S36.

Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Read chapter VII, ‘Walking in the city’).*

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury Academic. (Chapter 14. 1440 The Smooth and the Striated).

Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the right to the city to Urban Revolution. London: Verso. (Chapters by personal choice).*

Holston, James. 1999. “Spaces of insurgent citizenship”, in Cities and Citizenship, (eds.) James Holston and Arjun Appadurai. Durham: Duke University Press, 155-73.

Juris, Jeffrey S. 2012. “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation”. American Ethnologist 39(2): 259-79.

Lazar, Sian. 2017. The Social Life of Politics. Ethics, kinship and activism in Argentine unions. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Chapter 6).

——. 2018. "Spontaneity, Antagonism and the Moral Politics of Outrage: Urban Protest in Argentina since 2001”, in Worldwide Mobilizatons. Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, (eds.) Don Kalb and Massimiliano Mollona. Oxford: Berghahn.

Smith, Neil and Don Mitchell (eds.). 2018. Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City: University of Georgia Press. Chapters by personal choice.

Winegar, Jessica. 2012. “The privilege of revolution: Gender, class, space, and affect in Egypt”. American Ethnologist, 39(1): 67-70.

* = Book also from lecture on “Commons and un-commons”

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Morten Nielsen

Changing urban topographies: The verticalization of the city Urban development is conventionally imagined on the basis of a horizontal topography: A planned inner-city extends outwards, often ending in some lesser planned suburban or peri-urban areas. However, if we take a closer look at the vertical dynamics of urban developments, it is evident – both visibly and conceptually – that the rhythm of many cities throughout the world is driven by other kinds of contrasts, strategies, ruptures, which cannot be understood in terms of horizontalism. In this lecture, we will discuss different urban topographies and the effects of increasing verticalization on the viability and pace of cities today.

Acuto, Michele. 2010. “High-rise Dubai urban entrepreneurialism and the technology of symbolic power”. Cities, 27(4): 272-284. Adey, Peter. 2010. “Vertical security in the megacity: Legibility, mobility and aerial politics”. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(6): 51–67. Jacobs, Jane, Stephen Cairns, et al. 2007. “‘A tall storey ... but, a fact just the same’: The red road high-rise as a black box”. Urban Studies, 44(3): 609–629. McFarlane, Colin. 2015. “The Geographies of Urban Density: Topology, Politics and the City”. Progress in Human Geography, 40(5): 629-648. Nielsen, Morten. 2020 Forthcoming. “Rooftop Autophagy: Vertical Juxtacities in Maputo, Mozambique”. Urban Forum. —. 2016. “Urban Times: Temporal Topographies and Non-scalable Cities”. Ethnos 82(3): 393-405. O’Neill, Kevin. L. and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela. 2013. “Verticality”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9(2): 378-389. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. “The city: The sewer, the gaze and the contaminating touch”, in (eds.) Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London, Methuen, 125–148.

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Knut Rio

The city, its commons and un-commons In this talk, I will outline issues coming up when studying the Bois de Boulogne Park in Paris. It is a commons for the public of Paris, while at the same time being a space of bourgeois appropriation. This is an historical and organizational survey of the city’s changing management of the park, the role of the many private, elitist associations in the park, the part played by leisure industry and the circumstances of the establishment of new private associations in the park. I will raise some ideas about the public space and the city, seen in the perspective of recent developments where government and civil society become more and more entangled. I am interested in how people build ways of life that are integral to the relations with governing orders or that escape, evade or in other ways establish themselves outside of these.

Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Read chapter VII, ‘Walking in the city’.

Cullen, Joe and Paul Knox. 1982. “The City, the Self and Urban Society”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 7(3): 276- 291.

Franquesa, Jaume. 2013. “On Keeping and Selling. The Political Economy of Heritage Making in Contemporary Spain”. Current Anthropology, 54(3): 346-369.

Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the right to the city to Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Read chapter 1 and other chapters by personal choice. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2018. “Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy”. History and Anthropology, 29(3): 342-358. Sassen, Saskia. 2010. “Reading the City in a Global Digital Age: The Limits of Topographic Representation”. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(5): 7030-7041. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press. Read chapter 2 and 4. Susser, Ida (ed.) 2017. Exploring the urban commons. Special issue of Focaal, Volume 2017 Issue 79. (Recommended to read Intro and chapters by Susser, Nonini and Kalb).

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3) Elective books for the whole course

Choose and read one of the books below

Graham, Stephen. 2018. Vertical. The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London, Verso.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2019. Improvised lives. Rhythms of endurance in an urban South. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sennet, Richard. 2018. Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. Penguin Random House (Allen Lane).

4) Lectures and podcasts (optional)

Richard Sennet: The Organic City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLl0kTMjMhs

Camthropod Episode 6. Sounds of Protest. https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/media/listen-and-view/camthropod#episode-6--sounds-of-protest--by-sian-lazar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLl0kTMjMhshttps://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/media/listen-and-view/camthropod#episode-6--sounds-of-protest--by-sian-lazarhttps://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/media/listen-and-view/camthropod#episode-6--sounds-of-protest--by-sian-lazar