Urban Studies

Course Objective

Knowledge and understanding:
1. Students gain knowledge and understanding of the most important
research themes, concepts, and debates within the field of urban
anthropology.
2. Students can recognize how urban development, inequality and
insecurity are spatialized, materialized, reproduced, challenged, and
represented in cities of the Global North and the Global South.

Application:
3. Students can apply key concepts from urban anthropology to an urban
case study in Amsterdam or another city in the Netherlands.
4. Students hone their qualitative research skills and become attuned to
the ethnographic sensitivities that urban settings require.

Making judgements:
5. Students develop a critical attitude towards social, spatial, and
material urban dynamics and can formulate their own questions on urban
processes.
6. Students are better able to reflect on their own role as researchers
operating in an urban setting.

Communication:
7. Students can report on their respective research projects in verbal
and written form.

Learning skills:
8. Students have learned to work in small research teams to carry out a
short-term ethnographic research project.

Course Content

Cities are not just static locations; they are also thought-provoking
processes. Across the Global North and South, cities shape – and are
shaped by – the way people, nature, resources, infrastructures, and
ideas flow and settle. Drawing on interdisciplinary and anthropological
debates on ‘the urban’, this course delves into the social, spatial,
material, and cultural processes that drive and result from patterns of
urban development, inequality, and insecurity. These themes are explored
through case studies that raise questions on how and why resources and
risk are distributed unequally across and within different urban
environments. Additionally, we also engage the everyday modes of
resistance and negotiation that emerge in response to social and spatial
forms of inequality. During the course, students will have the
opportunity to conduct their own urban research projects in relation to
themes such as housing, gentrification, sustainability, and labour.

Additional Information Teaching Methods

Lectures and tutorials

Method of Assessment

Written exam (50%) and research project in teams (50%)

Literature

To be announced on Canvas.

Additional Information Target Audience

2nd year students in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology;
Students in the Minor Anthropology or the Minor Development and Global
Challenges; Also open as an elective course for Exchange Students.

Additional Information

This course fits into several programmes. It is part of the Bachelor
Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology; it is the closing of
the theme block “Development”, but in time follows directly on two
courses from the theme block “World Making” (in particular Identity,
Diversity and Inclusion, and Nation and Migration). The themes of these
courses –politics, inequality, development, globalization, diversity,
identity, migration– all return in Urban Studies. In the same vein,
Urban Studies is the closing of the minor Development and Global
Challenges and the minor Anthropology. While Urban Studies is
integrated in all these programmes, the course can also be taken
as an elective course of its own.
Note that students are expected to attend three preparatory meetings in
November-December (the so-called studielint).

Recommended background knowledge

There are no requirements, but ideally students have completed the
courses Political and Economic Anthropology, and Development and
Globalization (for BSc CAO and minor Anthropology), or Development and
Globalization and Identity, Diversity and Inclusion (Minor DGC).