URB_430a Seminar: ‘Confronting Urbanization: Research On the (Inter)-Active Tissue of Urban Life’

This course investigated the urban condition through the lens of its interactive tissue—a tissue that ranges from smart phones, the world wide web, credit cards, highway systems, airports, and sidewalks to indoor plumbing. This tissue is the multi-scalar and operative framework that mediates various flows or stoppages, adapts to changing conditions over time, crosses over, divides, accommodates shortcuts, and is able to redistribute as well as swell and deflate. It resides as a naturalized background that is as ordinary and unremarkable to us as air. Within this frame of reference, students investigated and documented emergent interrelationships between various actors and the agencies through which they engage with the interactive tissue, as well as how they shape and influence one another.

The central questions at stake in this debate included: How does daily life and communication unfold in this limitlessness and complete integration of movement where the collective dimension of life seems to have been relinquished? Who are the game changers in this process of urbanization and who is left out? Knowing that things and events have a limit, a form, and an existence, is there a limit to this infinity?