“Most of the world lives in cities,” scholars say, explaining why urban studies are important across anthropology, sociology, history, critical geography, political science, and literature. But what about the lives not yet lived in cities? What can we learn by approaching the city through its futures? How can the future help us to understand the pasts, presents, and possibilities of urban life? In this course, these questions will guide us as we familiarize ourselves with ethnographies, theories, literature, and films about how ideas, plans, and negotiations around the future shape cities. Then, we will put them into context through close readings and discussions of cases across the Americas, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Africa. We will critically consider the inequalities and power asymmetries of urban change and the opportunities for solidarity and resilience that thinking and acting through the future affords. And throughout, we will investigate how multiple understandings of the future figure into diverse experiences of, plans for, and politics of cities. We will explore the links between the future and planning (Part I), politics (Part II), hope (Part III), speculations (Part IV), and improvisations (Part V) in urban life, before ending with a critical engagement/assignment about the city yet to come.
By the end of this course, you will be familiar with the relationship between cities and futures: how cities are informed by future-oriented ideas and plans, and how urban lives challenge, shape, and recalibrate the future. You will develop a critical perspective on dominant universalistic conceptions of urban life and its possibilities, often based on Western experiences and urban models, by considering urban futures through race, gender, sexuality, and other vectors of social life.
About Professor Arcan
Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist whose research interests lie in urban transformation, futurity, care, temporality, migration, and urbanism in the Middle East, and more specifically, in Istanbul. In her current project, she explores these issues through an engaged ethnography of Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood. Her work has appeared in Current Anthropology, City & Society, and the Radical Housing Journal.