290039 PS Theoretische Diskurse zu ,Infrastruktur' aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive (2020W)

Please note: The course description might has to be adapted and the seminar will be moved to online-only teaching in case of short-dated overall changes.
Bitte beachten: Angaben zum Inhalt dieses Seminars unter Vorbehalt kurzfristiger Änderungen (Umstieg auf digitale Lehre)!

** This seminar is an English-language course including readings, written assignments and discussions.
Course units will be held both in-class as well as online (regularly each week)

Infrastructures, including technical, social and even informal support infrastructure, are of major importance for the development of regions, cities and neighbourhoods. In the past, they have served as a traditional research topic in geography. For example, traditional debates in geography focus on matters of accessibility through transport infrastructure or ICT that are of importance for regional competitiveness. Also, questions with regard to how to secure or re-build social and technical infrastructures in shrinking regions have been part of academic and planning debates. Nevertheless, these debates demonstrate a rather essentialist perspective as they often see infrastructures as being “simply there”. In recent years, scientific discourses emerged arguing against this essentialist perspective by rather revealing the complex practices of power and deliberation that are accompanying infrastructure projects but also the functioning of infrastructures for everyday life. These discourses are interdiscplinary stemming from debates such as (critical) geography, anthropology or STS and open new perspectives for planning and development issues.

The aim of this course is to gain an overview as well as a deeper understanding of these current academic discourses on “infrastructure” from an interdisciplinary perspective. In this course, you will
- Develop knowledge on “infrastructure” through in-depth literature analysis deriving from different disciplines.
- Learn to critically reflect on these discourses, to embed these discourses into disciplinary paradigms and to link different approaches to receive a deeper insight into the topic.
- Contribute to a comprehensive understanding of infrastructure from a socio-spatial geographic perspective.
- Assess one “infrastructure example” based on theory-based criteria and its impact on multi-spatial scales.

After the course, participants should be able to reflect upon as well as critically examine practical issues on infrastructure planning and urban/regional development in accordance with scientific debates. This will be achieved by reading and discussing texts provided by the lecturers as well as analysing examples from planning practice. Students’ active presentation, input and feedback will be central to the course.