Online course at Zoom  

We continue the course Spectra of the Urban Phenomenon with a historical review of thinking about the city. Particular attention will be paid to urban utopias and the philosophical concepts underlying the currents of thought and urbanism and the historical contexts in which they have arisen. We will identify the struggle between liberal progressive positivism, culturalist conservatism, Marxist currents, rationalist versus cultural models and technotopias until the emergence of movements critical of urbanism in the late 1960s.

Returning to the movements critical of urbanism that emerged in the postmodern shift in the West, the course Spectra of the Urban Phenomenon will probe deeper into urban criticism and the movement of radical geography. The aim is to attain a more sociological and geopolitical epistemology of the urban phenomenon, as it developed from the 1960s onwards through critical thinkers and writers such as Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, Edward Soja, Mike Davis, Neil Smith, Jane Jacobs, Richard Peet, Saskia Sassen, Raquel Rolnik, Manuel Delgado and David Harvey.

We will try to build a focused and transdisciplinary approach, also drawing on relevant authors from decolonial and feminist thought such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, Laura Rita Segato, Aníbal Quijano, Martha Rosler, Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe, Sayak Valencia and Néstor García Canclini.

Nancy Garín (Chile, 1972) is an independent journalist, art researcher and curator working in projects related to critical thinking, new pedagogies, archives, memory and decolonialism. She was a member of the Etcetera art group, La Internacional Errorista and the research group Peninsula: Colonial Processes and Artistic and Curatorial Practices. She is a member of the research and production platforms Equipo re and Espectros de lo Urbano.

Antoine Silvestre is an architect and philosopher. After graduating in Architecture from the National School of Architecture in Strasbourg in 2007, he worked as an independent architect until 2013. He earned a master's degree in Citizenship and Human Rights: Ethics and Politics at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona in 2015. Since then, he has been conducting research into the relationship between city, capitalism and urbanism within the framework inherited from the European world system and modern liberal democracies. He also works in architectural design, stage design and web platform design, teaches workshops and writes critical essays.