Kommentar |
This seminar works best if you have taken or are taken also the ‘urban theory’ seminar, like exploring new methods but are confident applying your statistical skills too, and are ready to dress warm and waterproof this winter. It will be taught face-to-face only, if not in seminar rooms then on-site outdoors in pandemic-proof small groups. Our overarching question is how we construct intersubjective experiences of safety in the city and how we construct public trust. If we understand the city as a social fabric that is not only knitted through its hubs of institutions, social movements and social networks, but also as a fabric woven by fluid encounters between people unknown to each other, then how do we develop a sense of place and a sense of safety? What is the role of trust, and how may trust develop? Was Simmel right that we move through the city protecting ourselves to too much impulses, or can we also observe urban care and its ‘negative’ (?) other side, social control, between strangers? We will discuss these themes through a mixture of conceptual readings, doing our own work by walking-as-method, and students will write final projects that draw on their own statistical analyses of existing datasets on safety and trust in five Berlin neighborhoods in combination with the walking ethnography data that we will produce together during the semester. Whereas I cannot force you to attend, this class only ‘works’ if you are committed to showing up on a more than regular basis. The seminar is bi-lingual: we start off in English and most readings are in English, but anyone is welcome to talk in German, and you must be able to understand and read German very well to attend. |
Literatur |
- Blokland, T. (2018) The public life of social capital. In: Hall, S. & R. Burdett (eds) The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century. London: Sage, pp. 552-666
- Blokland, T. (2018) Community as Urban Practice. Cambridge: Polity.
- Blokland, T. (2021) Zwischen Dreck und Drogen: Sicherheitsempfinden am Kottbusser Tor. Berlin: Logos.
- Hessel, Franz (2011) Spazieren in Berlin: Ein Lehrbuch der Kunstspazieren zu gehen ganz nah dem Zauber der Stadt von dem sie selbst kaum weiß. En Bilderbuch in Worten.
- Shortell, T. & E. Brown (2014) Walking in the European City: Quotodian Mobility and Urban Ethnography. London: Routledge
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