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

2023/2024

Учебный год

ENG

Обучение ведется на английском языке

6

Кредиты

Кто читает:

Департамент социологии

Статус:

Курс по выбору

Когда читается:

2-й курс, 1, 2 модуль

Преподаватель

Покровский Никита Евгеньевич

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.

Learning Objectives

• As a result, students should: Know: - seminal texts in urban-studies - basic concepts and principles of urban-studies and main areas of research on which this discipline focuses. Be able to: - construct productive research questions using approaches of urban-studies - apply the concepts of urban-studies mainstreaming to their research designs in comparative social research - to distinguish, collect and apply various social data to urban- issues - to criticize urban-studies. Have: - the skill to criticize and evaluate the quality of outcome of different forms of urbanstudies - the skill to meaningfully construct urban- research questions - the skill to model research in the field of urban-studies.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• уметь анализировать события и факты с позиций социологии.
• знать основные принципы и понятия общей социологии, ключевые теоретические подходы к изучению общества и его подсистем.
• уметь применять разнообразные аналитические инструменты, используемые в современных экономико-социологических исследованиях.
• знать основные подходы к изучению хозяйства и общества, выработанные в экономической социологии.

Course Contents

• SESSION ONE: Globalization and the City.
• SESSION TWO: Person-Environment Transactions and the Nested Ecology of Urban Living.
• SESSION THREE: Perceiving, Remembering, and Going About the City
• SESSION FOUR: City Plan: Concentric Circles, Grids, Complex Patterns (and Rivers and Mountains Too)
• SESSION FIVE: Orders of Public Interaction.
• SESSION SIX: Culture, Community, and Class: Courtyard, Neighborhood, District
• SESSION SEVEN: Globalization, Mobility, and Splintering Urbanism
• SESSION EIGHT: Urban Futures: Concentration or De-Urbanization
• SESSION NINE: Phenomena of panic and disorder in psychology and sociology
• SESSION TEN: What do we mean by society? What is Risk Society?

Assessment Elements

• Class discussions
• Activity and participation

Interim Assessment

• 2023/2024 2nd module
  0.5 * Activity and participation + 0.5 * Class discussions

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• Introductory sociology, Bilton, T., 2002

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• Sociology : a global introduction, Macionis, J. J., 2005