Cities and Global Capitalism

How do global capital flows, neoliberal rationalities, and elite-led (re)development projects shape urban space around the world—including the buildings, transit infrastructures, and campus environments that we navigate on a daily basis? To what extent are our imaginaries concerning urban space, and the places that we inhabit and traverse, similarly molded by global-capitalist dynamics? In turn, what role do cities play as privileged sites in the maintenance, reproduction, and spread of global capitalism—as well as of efforts to contest it (for example, under the framework of promoting a “right to the city”)?

This courses explores, from a critical political-economy perspective, the nexus between urban space and the global capitalist system. Specifically, we will analyze how global capitalism makes and remakes contemporary cities, including the built environment and socio-spatial dynamics therein, but also the dialectical processes through which cities and spatial logics simultaneously reshape global capitalism and its geographies of accumulation. Throughout, we will engage with diverse, transdisciplinary interlocutors, sources, and media to highlight not only the links between the contemporary city and the generation and/or perpetuation of inequalities, social hierarchies, and environmental degradation—but also alternative models for affordable housing, climate-friendly construction, and the democratization of urban space.

Naturally, our embeddedness in New York City will provide an important vantage point from which to contemplate these issues. Additionally, we will pay particular attention to cities in Brazil, Latin America more broadly—the world’s most urbanized region—and elsewhere in the Global South, where especially acute elite anxieties concerning modernity, underdevelopment, and globality have led to recurring (and often European-inspired) efforts to refashion urban space, as well as to create entirely new cities.