2022/2023

Public and Private Spheres Dynamics in the Process of Urbanization/De-urbanization

Type: Mago-Lego

Delivered by: School of Sociology

When: 1, 2 module

Open to: students of all HSE University campuses

Instructors: Nikita Pokrovsky

Language: English

ECTS credits: 4

Contact hours: 32

Course Syllabus

Abstract

According to the UN Population Fund, since 2007 for the first time in history over half of Earth population lives in cities. But what is a city? And what is the nature of everyday life in it? What, to invert the title of Louis Wirth’s famous paper, does ‘urbanism’ mean as a way of life? In this course we will unfold the nature of urban everyday life from a broadly construed nested ecological/transactional standpoint, that is, looking at multiple levels of organization of life (from a single person going about their routine daily activities; through the interactions between multiple people as they self-organize into various social forms of common living, such as neighborhoods or ‘the public’; through the spatial embeddedness of human patterns of common activities in urban spatial and architectural forms; to the broad processes of urban change in context of globalization). We will examine these levels as they all project upon everyday life—that ‘common denominator,’ as Henri Lefebvre termed it, of the various facets and dimensions of social and economic life. The main purpose of this course is to understand urbanism as a complex process, and to examine how the various dimensions and domains of urban living arise out of everyday life and, simultaneously, enable, structure, organize, restrict, and project themselves into everyday life. Thus, our point of reference at all times will be the lived experience of a person inhabiting an urban milieu. We will bring in perspectives from urban sociology, urban psychology, and urban geography to explore these complexities.