Explore and Experience the Urban Field
Prof. Talja Blokland Professor for Regional and Urban Sociology, Humboldt University of Berlin That the urban is undergoing transformations is inherent: whereas urban studies may have searched for the city of stability and equilibrium, more and more scholars now focus on the dynamics of the urban. This means, however, that our understanding of the urban…
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In the past 30 years we have witnessed a proliferation of exhaustive literature on trendy subjects such as ‘Globalisation’, ‘Sustainability’ and ‘Urban Changes’. Varied branches of Humanities and Social Sciences have engaged in the stock taking of ‘Urban transitions’, and the rhetoric of multi-disciplinary study and research approaches on urban phenomenon are over-emphasized and coined in…
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Participation is the moment/practice in which things that are otherwise taken for granted can be problematized. My talk will depart from two observations concerning current transformations in urban politics. The first one is that one of the most significant technological challenges for contemporary collectives lies in the design, maintenance and integration of urban infrastructures. If…
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Big thanks to Prof. Alexa Färber for this inspiring kickoff lecture and her thoughts and insights on concepts of the city as promissory assemblage and the non-/transformative as an everyday concern, raising questions on how to engage with promises, both unfulfilled and enduring, especially in urban infrastructures. “Cities are ever-changing arrangements of human and nonhuman…
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We started DAY I with Pecha Kucha presentations of all of our admitted participants. Through almost twenty-five different perspectives across various disciplines – including geography, architecture, visual communication, anthropology, and more – we discovered common themes: Political mobilization (class warfare, political violence, resistance, etc.) (Lack of) commons (physical and spatial division, creating spaces of encounter,…
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One can observe academics as well as non-academic disciplines with a research interest in urban settings facing methodological challenges when searching for ways to visualize and analyze the urban every day, its social and spatial connections, interactions, infrastructures and complexities. As ethnographers, geographers, artists and urban planners, our research methods must navigate multiple scales of…
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We are in the middle of the last preparations for our upcoming KOSMOS Workshop “Beyond Urban Transformation” and very look forward to welcoming you very soon at Humboldt-University of Berlin at Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies. Wishing all our participants and speakers safe travels. Enjoy your first days exploring Berlin! The workshop will…
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