230137 SE Reimagining Cities (2017W)

STS scholars have shown an increased interest in fields outside their original focus of knowledge cultures in science and technology and their implications. These fields consist of aspects as diverse as care, disasters, financial markets, buildings, arts studios and territorial planning as well as it will be the focus of this seminar; cities. From a social scientific perspective, particularly geographers and sociologists have studied cities, mainly in relation to power structures and social phenomena in the city, like capitalism, colonialism, poverty, gentrification, social segregation and social environments.
The focus of an STS - or as we call it here - a relational perspective, is more related to the question: ‘What is a city? and how is urbanity performed, made and enacted within specific socio-material environments and through which artefacts, practices and agency? ’For such analyses, approaches, like SCOT, co-production and particularly ANT have gained of an increased meaning. This relational or socio-material understanding of a city as an artefact, a network or as assemblages, has led to an interest in the ways associations between actors, artefacts, space, practices and agency are formed, negotiated and stabilised through diverse and situated practices.

This course aims at giving students insight into the multifaceted aspects that make a city. Students will learn to use an STS perspective on studying urbanity. They will apply approaches, such as SCOT, co-production and ANT to specific urban questions. In particular, we will discuss key concepts in urban STS, like the social construction of urban territories as well as such that interpret cities through networks, spaces, practices and assemblages. We will have a particular look such novel relational concepts, like splintering urbanism, urban assemblages and assemblage urbanism and urban cosmopolitics as well as at debates that have emerged around them.
Methods of the course consist of class discussions, individual reading responses and two excursions to specific sites in the city of Vienna. Students will also write and document blog posts on the excursions and present them in the last session.