Virtual course on Post-Industrial Cities

Virtual course: Great transformations in Post‐industrial Cities: superdiversity and social innovation

Tuesdays 16:00‐18:00 (CET), the course will be hold in English and digitally in zoom, start: 13.04.2021

Coordinated by Professor Dr. Ludger Pries, Faculty of Social Sciences, Sociology, Organisation, Migration, participation (RUB)  

This course offers an interdisciplinary overview of basic societal changes in big post‐industrial cities. It is embedded in the efforts of the UNIC‐network of eight post‐industrial cities to strengthen common teaching and research activities and to boost mobility and inclusion of students and fellows between the participating universities.  

The Hungarian‐Austrian social scientist Karl Polanyi characterized as “Great Transformation” (1944) the deep social change of the 19th and 20th century towards industrial capitalism and nation states with corresponding tensions between market and state regulation, commodification and social norms and values, unleashed economy and participatory democracy. In the 21st century, we observe deep restructuration and social change in all formerly industrial cities. These great transformations refer to legal and regulative frameworks, to social diversity and coherence, to cultural and cognitive mappings in arts and literature as well as to migrations and the use of space. Currently, climate change, digitalization, biotechnologies, transnationalization and pandemic‐fueled restructuring of home and office as well as other social innovations boost the socio‐ ecological transformations in post‐industrial cities. 

This course is composed by inputs of scholars from different scientific disciplines of the UNIC universities. All sessions will be organized digitally in Zoom and rely on a course on the Moodle platform. Each session will begin with a live or recorded video conference of a specialized scholar of one of the UNIC universities. Participants of the course will then have the chance to deepen their knowledge concerning the related topic based on readings and discussions. Smaller working groups will produce specific out‐ puts like papers, presentations or videos and bring together students from different universities and disciplines.

Participants: The course/module is for students, who finished introductory university courses (3rd semester on). The course fits best into a social science curriculum or electives taught by the Social Sciences to non-SC students but students of other study fields are welcome too.  

Conditions: Regular and active participation in Part 1 (Lectures, each Tuesday 16‐16.30 CET, digital) and Part 2 (weekly plenary and group work, each Tuesday 16.30‐18.00 CET, digital); 14 sessions, zoom. Moo‐ dle code will be sent via eCampus or email to all registered and accepted participants. participants can get a certificate of attendance, when participating actively in min. 12 sessions and in working groups/writing short essays) or a proof of performance (max. 5 credit points for RUB students) participating actively in min. 12 sessions and in working groups/writing short essays and writing an extended paper (Hausarbeit).   All participants should contact their home university beforehand for the recognition of CPs!    

Registration and further information: ludger.pries@rub.de 

Registration deadline: 7.4.2021 (limited number of participants) 

www.sowi.ruhr‐uni‐bochum.de/sozomm/pries.html.en

Literature: 

Hall, Peter. 1997. Modelling the Post‐Industrial City. Futures, Vol. 29 (4/5): 311‐322. Tonkiss, Fran. 2013. Cities by Design. The Social Life of Urban Form. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, Suzanne/Burdett, Ricky. 2017. The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: SAGE. https://www.unic.eu/ https://www.unic.eu/our‐universities/ruhr‐university‐bochum/

Please find the course programme here:

210706 Program-course Great Transformation-SoSe_2021-Pries-UNIC.pdf