In our rapidly changing and contested global environment, cities are becoming increasingly important: they house a majority of the world’s inhabitants and act as catalysts of social, economic, cultural, and ecological change. Urban Studies at the University of Basel offers a new platform for understanding these planetary transformations, starting from the premise that the world’s urban and environmental challenges call not only for new ways of doing but for new ways of thinking. Imagining alternative futures means rethinking the present—its historical making, its political unfolding, and the ways in which it is made sensible.

Starting in Fall 2017, the University of Basel’s Master in Critical Urbanisms is an English-taught four-semester program that will train a new generation of graduates to think beyond divisions of urban versus rural and North versus South in order to address the complexity of urban lifeworlds in the twenty-first century. The program is founded by an internationally recognized faculty who work on and with cities and territories from a global perspective. The curriculum is structured around an interdisciplinary research studio where students work together combining humanities and social-scientific methods with visual and spatial analysis, and a semester of study and fieldwork in Cape Town, at the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town.

Mission Statement

Urban Studies at the University of Basel starts from the premise that the world’s most pressing urban and environmental challenges call not only for new ways of doing but for new ways of thinking. Imagining alternative futures means rethinking the present and the past. Instead of seeking to solve problems as they appear, we interrogate their historical making, their political unfolding, and the ways in which they are represented. We do so by approaching scientific expertise, intellectual constructs, and professional practices through the study of lived experience, in all its complexity and contradictions.

The transformation of cities and territories has long escaped treatment as a topic exclusive to any one discipline or profession. To tackle this century’s urban and ecological crises, we need more than the practical application of specialized knowledge. Against the abstraction of the bird’s-eye view and the limits of problem-solving expertise, we are committed to critical, interdisciplinary interrogation as the foundation for imagining alternative futures. With this in mind, we harness methods drawn from the humanities, social sciences, and design disciplines in order to address contemporary conditions ranging from land degradation and the spatial violence of modernization to ever-increasing flows of global migration. We deploy in-depth fieldwork and archival research but also include visual media and creative intervention as forms of research integral to everyday processes of knowledge acquisition.

Key themes for our teaching and research are: – Legacies of empire and comparative colonial after-lives – Spatial and architectural practices of mobility and migration – Territorial dimensions of resource economies – Urban cultures, creativity, and the production of imaginaries – Urban governance, politics, and spatial violence

Drawing explicitly on the research and teaching experience of our faculty, these thematic focus points bring specific interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on fundamental questions of contemporary global urbanization. They open the way to original analyses grounded in the concreteness of everyday life and provide platforms for faculty and students to transcend problematic geographic divides of North versus South and centre versus periphery.

Central to this intellectual project is a move away from looking at cities as discrete and self-contained entities toward thinking of them as embedded in complex and overlapping territories shaped by political and material processes that connect distant and even disparate spaces across the globe. Migration and remittance flows are transforming not only global cities but rural landscapes across the developing world. Material waste travels from rich cities to poor countries, radically impacting lives and livelihoods across vast distances. Global agribusiness reconfigures large sections of rural Africa to become the breadbaskets of new megacities in Asia and elsewhere. A perspective attuned to such translocal processes allows for analyses capable of capturing the complex dynamics of contemporary globalization. Specifically, it opens paths for thinking beyond parochial definitions of space, place, and environment, as well as the limiting framework of identity politics and area studies. The foregoing informs debates in multiple fields, including urban studies, anthropology, architecture and planning, art and architectural history, geography, and sociology.

Master’s Program

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INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTERNATIONAL STUDY

The Masters draws on a diverse faculty from across the humanities, social sciences, and design disciplines to develop ways of interdisciplinary learning. At its core stands a pedagogical model, a jointly taught research studio that immerses students in collaborative research using a wide variety of material, discursive, and visual methods. A second unique quality of the program is its international learning experience, with a semester of study and fieldwork research in Cape Town, anchored in the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town. Through fieldwork, archival work, and mapping, students gain fluency in spatial, social, and visual research methods. As such, they acquire relevant practical and theoretical knowledge of the social, economic, cultural, and political processes that make up cities and territories. Interdisciplinary proficiency and international experience will enable graduates of the program to effectively interact with the broad range of constituents and institutions that play a vital role in shaping the future of cities in a global context.

THE DEGREE PROGRAM

The University of Basel’s Master in Critical Urbanisms will be taught in English and begins in Fall 2017. Administered by Urban Studies faculty members and staff within the Department of Social Science, the program builds upon existing departments and research centers at the University of Basel, notably the Centre for African Studies and eikones. Students also benefit from a close collaboration between the University of Basel and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town.

RESEARCH STUDIO

Taken in the first and third semesters, the research studio immerses students in collaborative, interdisciplinary research practice that combines humanities and social-scientific methods with visual and spatial analysis and representation. Jointly taught by core and affiliated faculty, with regular visits by external experts, the studio takes place in a dedicated studio space that acts as a laboratory in which small teams of students hailing from different disciplinary backgrounds can work closely together.

Students will work on a range of outputs, from essays to illustrated booklets, maps and diagrams, photographic projects, videos, and installations. This work will be assembled and edited for public presentation as the collective outcome of the research studio. The research studio theme for 2017 through 2021 is Highway Africa.