APG5089S - Curating Urban Regulation

Course Outline:

This course aims to build on the practical and conceptual work focused on the challenges and urgencies of southern urbanism that students undertake in the first semester in the City Research Studio, Urban Everyday and/or Urban Theory, and zeroes in on the problem of adapting these lessons for the realm of urban governance and regulation. The central question then is this: What does critical policy look like from the vantage point of African cities? The course will seek to offer answers to this question primarily by adopting a design perspective: byapplying a design lens to think about space and politics and what alternative modes of regulation are possible (given, for instance, constant technological innovation) and necessary (given the multipleand intersecting crises of accesstowater, food, housing and other basic needs). The central aim of the course is to facilitate students' process to map, interpret and devise regulatory modes and practices of urban intervention that are capable of meaningfully addressing the most pressing problems of our cities and transform the places where people live.