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Spring, 2007

UP 521
Advanced International Development Planning:
Cities and Citizenship in the Transnational Era
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Professor: Faranak Miraftab, Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning
Day & Time: Thursdays 2:00-4:50 PM. Room 19 Temple Buell Hall
Office Hours: by appointment. Room 218 Temple Buell Hall
Email: faranak@uiuc.edu
CRN: 44313

Course Description

This advanced seminar will bring together graduate students from across campus with strong focus and interest in transnational urban studies to collectively interrogate and examine the complexity of urban development and urban citizenship in a transnational era. Selected readings within the emergent scholarship in urban planning, geography, anthropology, political science, sociology and architecture will be used as catalyst to reflect and re-interpret our understanding of urban development as processes that are culturally and socio economically shaped here as well as elsewhere, and urban citizenship as practices that are shaped by citizens practices from below and state’s policies and regulations from above.

The vast movement and crisscrossing of populations in an evolving city form is the focus of a large body of research. Research on remittances has illustrated how immigrants’ earnings in one location lead to urban development in another location across the globe that come to define their new social, economic, and political spaces. Moreover the cultural influence experienced by one group in one geographic and political economic location often leads to change in cultural practices and its spatial expressions in another. The extent of these intense and interconnected links on one hand, questions the validity of a territorially bounded examination of urban citizenship and urban development processes; and on the other, stresses the importance of examining global processes not as abstract and place-less free floating processes but as locally grounded transnational processes. The course will seek the latter by examining the local and trans-local relationships that shape and re-shape the cities and the practices of citizenship.

To facilitate students serious engagement with the course readings and discussions this seminar will try to be responsive to participating student’s research needs by (a) welcoming their input into selection of readings during the opening session of the semester; and (b) allowing students to work towards a final research paper which addresses student’s own research interest. For their final paper the course will not require students to focus a specific theme or parameter, but on a topic of choice of relevance to the overarching theme of the course that will best prepare the individual student for her/his doctoral exam, dissertation or thesis research, or any other larger academic or professional objective. The course will also require submission of written weekly reflections on the weekly course readings to be posted on the course Web Board on Thursdays no later than 8AM.

The tentative themes and list of readings include the following:

(I) Transnationalism and uneven socio-spatial development; continued accumulation by dispossession (5 weeks)

• Mike Davis, 2006. The Planet of Slums. Verso.
• David Harvey, 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Verso.
• James Ferguson, 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Duke university press.
• Derek Gregory, 2004. Colonial Present. Blackwell publishing.
• Gilian Hart, 2002. Destabilizing Globalization. University of California Press.

(II) Transnational urban strategies and the “Giuliani factor” (1 week)

• Diane Davis. 2007. “Conflict. Cooperation, Convergence: Globalization and the Politics of Downtown Development in Mexico City.” Politics and Globalization, Research in Political Sociology 15: 139-174.
• Diane Davis, forthcoming. “The Giuliani Factor: Crime, Zero Tolerance policing, and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Downtown Mexico City.” In Gareth Jones (ed.) Public Space and Public Sphere in Urban Mexico.

Faranak Miraftab. Forthcoming. “ Governing Post-apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town. ” Antipode: Radical Journal of Geography.

• Lawrence Herzego. 2006. Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City-Building in a Global Era. University of Texas Press. (extracts).

(III) Transnational urbanism (3 weeks)

• Michael Peter Smith. 2001. Transnational Urbanism : Locating Globalization . Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.
• Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds.) 1998. Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. (extracts—several chapters).
• Mike Davis.2000. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City. London; New York: Verso.
• Anthony D. King. 2004. Spaces of Global Culture: Architecture Urbanism Identity. New York: Routledge.

(IV) Transnationalism and Citizenship (3 weeks)

• Michael Peter Smith. 2006. “The Two Faces of Transnational Citizenship”

. 2005. “Power in Place/ Places of Power: Contextualizing Transnational Research,” City and Society 17(1): 5-34.

. 2003. “ Transnationalism, the State and the Extraterritorial Citizen.” Politics and Society 31(4): 476-502.

• Aihwa Ong. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Duke University press.

, Flexible Citizenship (extracts—several chapters).

Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (eds.) 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. (extracts—several chapters).