Urban Studies: Un/Safety in Urban Space (SoSe 2022)

How is safety constructed in urban space? Both geographers interested in the imagination of safe life, safe environment and existential needs of safety. Professor Helbrecht and colleagues have been developing a framework inspired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to understand what kind of psycho-spatial arrangements of what they describe as 'home-making' are involved in establishing ontological security. Security and safety in urban space can also be thought from a relational perspective in which the unit of analyses are the social interactions and relations of passers by in fluid encounters in cities, as has been the main focus of work on safety and public space by Professor Blokland and her team, who have developed the thesis that roots and routes can both contribute to sense of home, comfort and safety. In this research seminar, we will bring these perspectives into conversation in interdisciplinary urban studies: after a brief introductory session for which students must prepare by reading 4 key texts, the seminar consist of two days of walking-as-method in combination with sit-down discussions, at the end of which students produce collective contributions in the form of a blog, drawing on the fragments of urban life as collected during the two day as and their reflections drawing form the theories. The seminar is limited to max. 15 students with evidenced previous experiences in qualitative research and good knowledge of urban geography/sociology

Das Seminar richtet sich an Studierende im überfachlichen Wahlpflichtbereich (ÜWP). Es ist interdisziplinär ausgerichtet und wird vom Georg-Simmel-Zentrum für Metropolenforschung (GSZ) verantwortet.

Dates:
Introduction Session: Mo. 25.04. from 10:00 to 12:00.
Blockseminar Sessions: Thursday 9.06. & Friday 10.06.22, respectively from 10:00 to 17:00.

All sessions take place at GSZ, Møhrenstr. 40/41, 10117 Berlin (4th floor, room 415).

Botterill, Kate, Peter Hopkins, and Gurchathen S. Sanghera. 2019. “Young People’s Everyday Securities: Pre-emptive and Pro-active Strategies towards Ontological Security in Scotland.” Social & Cultural Geography 20 (4): 465–84.

Dirksmeier, Peter, and Ilse Helbrecht. 2015a. “Everyday Urban Encounters as Stratification Practices: Analysing Affects in Micro-situations of Power Struggles.” City 19 (4): 486–98.

Laing, Ronald D. 1990. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin Books.