233041 SE Cities - Planning - Infrastructure (2019W)

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 and arts studios as well as it will be the focus of this seminar; cities, urban planning and infrastructures. From a social scientific perspective, particularly geographers and sociologists have studied cities and their making, 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: ‘How is a city understood, made and enacted within specific socio-material environments?’ ‘How is urban planning performed and which artefacts, agency and practices are involved? How is infrastructure made and what does it mean in ontological terms?’ ’For such analyses, STS-approaches, like SCOT, co-production and particularly ANT have gained an increased meaning. Or, in other words, this relational or socio-material understanding of a city and its infrastructure as an artefact, a network or as urban assemblages, has led to an interest in the ways, associations between actors, artefacts, space, practices and agency in its making are formed, negotiated and stabilised through diverse and situated practices.

This course aims at providing students with insights into the multifaceted aspects that make a city. Students will learn to use an STS perspective on studying urbanity, urban infrastructures and planning. 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, obduracy, ontology of infrastructures, as well as such that interpret cities through networks, spaces, practices and assemblages. We will have a particular look such novel concepts, like splintering urbanism, urban assemblages, cosmopolitics and relational planning 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.