Course Description - UPPP 100 Cities of the Global South, Spring 2019, Professor Hun Kim
The 21st century is and continues to be an urban century with more than half of the world’s population residing in cities. Cities serve as command centers of the global economy, they are sites of global production and consumption, and are the places where struggles over rights and visions of alternative futures are produced, articulated, and challenged.
By 2050, sixty-six percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. The largest share of this tremendous urban growth will take place in the “global south,” or what we once considered the developing world. As the American century draws to a close, the global urban future is no longer defined by the likes of New York, Paris or Los Angles. Rather we are entering into an era of “southern” cities by the likes of, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mumbai and Bogota. These places represent some of the biggest challenges for twenty first century urbanism, offering us new perspectives on urban problems like poverty, development, segregation, citizenship, homelessness, inequality and our shared climate future.
The goal of this course is threefold. First, the course aims to introduce students to a set of key themes and theories about cities of the global south, drawing upon classic and contemporary works in the disciplines of urban planning, geography, urban anthropology and sociology. Second, students will learn about specific cities, which will be used as case examples to illuminate urban themes and theories. Third, the course encourages students to think across time, distance and conceptual boundaries in a comparative gesture. Students will thus not only be encouraged to compare cases across the global south, but also to utilize their knowledge about southern cities to reexamine US cities. In this way, students will be encouraged not only to think about the places of ‘elsewhere’ through their experience at home in the US, but also to reexamine and rethink the proximate places they call home, through the lens of the global South. The course will draw from some classic and contemporary texts, films, novels and other media to come to an understanding of the multifaceted and contradictory nature of the global city.
Professor Hun Kim, course instructor, talks more about what to expect from the course on the UCI Urban Planning IGTV channel. View it here.