Cities and Global Capitalism
How do global capital flows, neoliberal rationalities, and elite-led (re)development projects shape urban space around the world—including the buildings, transit infrastructures, and campus environments that we navigate on a daily basis? To what extent are our imaginaries concerning urban space, and the places that we inhabit and traverse, similarly molded by global-capitalist dynamics? In turn, what role do cities play as privileged sites in the maintenance, reproduction, and spread of global capitalism—as well as of efforts to contest it (for example, under the framework of promoting a “right to the city”)?
This courses explores, from a critical political-economy perspective, the nexus between urban space and the global capitalist system. Specifically, we will analyze how global capitalism makes and remakes contemporary cities, including the built environment and socio-spatial dynamics therein, but also the dialectical processes through which cities and spatial logics simultaneously reshape global capitalism and its geographies of accumulation. Throughout, we will engage with diverse, transdisciplinary interlocutors, sources, and media to highlight not only the links between the contemporary city and the generation and/or perpetuation of inequalities, social hierarchies, and environmental degradation—but also alternative models for affordable housing, climate-friendly construction, and the democratization of urban space.
Naturally, our embeddedness in New York City will provide an important vantage point from which to contemplate these issues. Additionally, we will pay particular attention to cities in Brazil, Latin America more broadly—the world’s most urbanized region—and elsewhere in the Global South, where especially acute elite anxieties concerning modernity, underdevelopment, and globality have led to recurring (and often European-inspired) efforts to refashion urban space, as well as to create entirely new cities.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Kevin Funk
h-index: 6 Info - 3 points
Global Latin America
Within the Global North social-science mainstream, Latin America (like other parts of the Global South) has often been conceptualized as a region of analytical interest due to its complex
internal
dynamics (relating, for example, to recurring authoritarian rule, democratization, transitional justice, “modernization” and economic development, and social mobilization). Yet until recently, these have infrequently been conceptualized as
global
processes in which Latin America plays a substantive role. To be sure, various
external
forces—namely, colonialism, imperialism, interventionism, and their legacies—are of course widely understood to have shaped Latin American in myriad ways. However, the notions that Latin America exercises agency (or at least matters) in world affairs, is more than a generally passive recipient of global flows, and is meaningfully connected to other regions (including through migratory, political, economic, and cultural linkages), have only recently begun to resonate within the Northern academy.
In contrast to the “methodological nationalism” (or “regionalism”) that has long characterized outside analysis of Latin America, this course foregrounds the region’s global embeddedness and world-making potential—as a protagonist in the generation, adaptation, and diffusion of diverse border-crossing flows, frameworks, and imaginaries. These include: global discourses concerning modernity, postmodernity, liberalism, and postcolonialism; global understandings of race, class, gender, and the intersections between them; global policy frameworks related to human rights, democracy, and economic development; historical and contemporary globalizing relations with distant parts of the world, including the Middle East and Asia; and global alternatives to a world order based on exclusion, extractivism, and environmental degradation.
Throughout, we will highlight the agency of state and non-state actors throughout “Latin America”—itself a homogenizing, Eurocentric label imposed from the outside—as constitutive forces in creating the world that we all inhabit, contributing to the problems that confront us, and helping to generate solutions. To do so, we will engage with a series of texts and materials produced by diversely situated interdisciplinary scholars, writers, artists, and political figures—many of them based in Latin America, an
- R 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Kevin Funk
h-index: 6 Info - 4 points