Cities and urban areas are contested spaces. They are spaces with powerful coalitions of interests, but also many voiceless and poor urban dwellers. Local politicians, city managers, residents, private entrepreneurs: whose interests determine and stimulate place making and how our cities transform? Who makes our cities, who ‘owns’ them, who governs them? In other words, what are the multi-scalar spatial politics and governance processes around these processes - particularly in times of increased social and ethnic diversities and translocal processes?
This interactive lecture deals with cities in the global South and North, their actors, their practices and motivations, their contexts, networks, and strategies, as well as with the underlying processes and the regulating instruments (institutions) that determine decisions in cities on a range of issues: housing, migration, urban social life, development, social and technical infrastructure, but also their histories and their service provision.
In this context, the interactive lecture explores different central themes.
First, it examines the social life of cities in terms of past and present migration phases and increased diversities. Who makes a city and for whom and why, what are the spatial dimensions of these practices and processes?
Second, the interactive lecture then reviews urban governance concepts and theories that explain and offer models how different actors come together in managing common affairs and fuse their resources in cities. This also includes multi-scalar administrative and institutional aspects of local self-governance and the re-distribution of political and fiscal authority between levels of government and between government, the private sector and residents and their organized interest groups.
Third, the lecture introduces further key concepts and different approaches relevant for contemporary urban social life, governance and the analysis of spatial politics in metropoles with their eventually very different urbanization patterns and trends.
These include diversity, migration and the city, social and ethnic segregation and their governance, informality, and comparative urbanism. Through the students’ presentations, the lecture also offers the possibility to critically reflect on the origins of such concepts and their applicability across contexts of the global South and North – in and beyond Europe.
