Slums: The Dark Side of the Cities

Catalog description

This course is inspired by CAPITALS, however, here the focus will be on something that CAPITALS mostly neglects, slums in countries from the Global South. The idea is to look at short stories, personal diaries, excerpts from novels, and films that portray slums. Slums are usually seen as problematic, as a sign of underdevelopment, as shameful and as a scar in the face of the city. Nevertheless, this course also shows how slums are part of developing processes and they not only present problems but also come up with creative solutions to them. If scarcity or the lack of material resources is a common trend in this kind of settlements, slums also produce new forms of social organization where the limitations in infrastructure and capital goods are overcome through the harnessing, harvesting, and reutilization of these limited supplies. Some guiding questions in this class are: What developed countries and societies can learn from these forms of organization? And how can we create a better future for this kind of settlements? Each week, we will focus on a different city. The cities that we will be looking at are Lima, São Paulo, Fort-de-France, Dakar, Luanda, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Beside the primary readings and visual materials, we are also going to read secondary texts from fields such as anthropology, economy, environmental studies, history, political science, and urban studies. All materials will be available in English and, whenever they were originally produced in a different language, in their original language too. Some of the primary languages beside English that the students might encounter in this class are French, Kimbundu, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Wolof.