City, Subversive
ARCH3308/3408/6308/6408 Architecture Culture and Society + Theory Seminar
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University
Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the “right to the city” argued that capital and rational technocratic modes of planning have colonized everyday life by the commodification of fundamental institutions (e.g. housing, food, transportation) and the casting of urban citizens as docile consumers of the capitalist economy. Within this process, as space becomes fragmented and abstracted into discrete, homogenous units for the purposes of top-down planning and privatization, the inhabitants of the city become likewise alienated “from their own humanity and social needs, alongside an estrangement from bodily and natural needs [and] from one another” (Butler, 2012). Whilst “the right to the city” has generally been associated with more radical political confrontations or established social organizations, in this seminar, students will have the opportunity to explore case studies and theoretical frameworks that speak to the subversive agency of everyday practices within the urban environment - how seemingly “quiet” acts and “ordinary” people can transform, alter, and subvert the course of urban development.
