Book
Imagining Urban Complexity. A Humanities Approach in Tropes, Media, and Genres
Imagining Urban Complexity introduces passionate and critical perspectives on the link between the humanities and urban studies.
- Author
- Frans-Willem Korsten and Anthony T. Albright
- Date
- 13 September 2024
- Links
- More information
It emphasizes tropes, media, and genres as cultural techniques that shape complexity in urban environments by distributing affordances, modes of sensing, and modes of sense-making. The book grew out of Frans-Willem and Anthony’s teaching experiences in The Hague. The course from which the book emerged, Imagining the City, was initially designed by Frans-Willem for first-year students in the university’s new Urban Studies program. This program attracted a different type of student, one that forced all participants in the program to rethink more fundamentally what a humanities approach to urbanism could or should look like. The result was a period of intense interdisciplinary research, with the classroom as a field of experiments. In 2021, Anthony entered this field as the book’s editor, translator, and eventually co-author, co-researcher, and co-teacher. It took another three years of intense interdisciplinary research, rewriting, deleting, and adding to get to the end result.
The overarching objective for the book and the course has been for students to take an active and critical attitude toward everyday life: to reflect on how dominant ways of sensing cities, and foundational assumptions about urban life, are political at heart. We also seek to extend this critical attitude to the university classroom situation itself, where one of the more specific aims of Imagining the City is to defamiliarize the habits of passive absorption and tactical memorization in which many of our students have been so effectively trained by Dutch and international high school curricula.
To this end, we recently replaced the traditional final exam for Imagining the City with a portfolio project in which students are asked to analyze photographic case studies from within ongoing scholarly debates presented in the book. Crucial, the methodological program of our book proposes, is to begin with what one sees: to describe the urban case study, in all of its possible obscurities or inconsistencies, without forcing it into a pre-established theoretical mold. Theories, we emphasize, are not just nice ideas waiting to be exemplified, and real life does not just take place in between more serious obligations.