Greetings Dear Students,
This is to welcome you to the 5th year first trimester module on Urban Anthropology.
In general, Urban anthropology is the study of cultural systems and identities in cities as well as the various political, social, economic, and cultural forces that shape urban forms and processes. However, the ARC5164 module focuses on examines urban life at different times and places. The goal of the course in this class year is to unpack the forces that act to shape and change cities and urban life as well as the resulting policy responses invented to solve the problems associated with the changes in order to improve the vision for the future city. The module is designed to support the final year thesis projects through relevant reader summaries and a better appreciation of the users and socio-cultural inter-relationships in their thesis projects.
Greetings Dear Students,
This is to welcome you to the fifth year and the module ARC 5164-Urban Anthropology. The module examines urban life at different times and places. It is a cross-cultural study of urbanization and human problems associated with it, especially in urban environments. As more of the world’s population settles in cities, the sites of anthropologists have increasingly shifted from rural to urban settings. The goal of the course in this class year is to investigate cities and their socio-cultural experiences and practices of urban dwellers in relation to the larger socio-economic and cultural contexts and questioning how thesis students can better represent the life worlds of urban dwellers and what anthropological insights and methods could contribute to a deeper understanding of the urban phenomena linked to their research projects. Major emphasis is given to the ethnography of city life and its relationship to the practical applications of urban research that the thesis students will be undertaking this year. Using literary works, ethnographies and case studies of African cities, the course hopes to present coherent and readable syntheses of theory, methods, and analysis of various urban issues and experiences of urban life.
Learning Objectives:
1. To learn basic anthropological approaches, concepts, issues, and perspectives of urban anthropology and the role of cities as social, economic and cultural nodes
2. To learn how to use anthropological research methods to describe, explain, and propose recommendations for solving urban problems.
3. To unpack outstanding examples of recent ethnographies of urban life and culture, for analyzing sociological conditions in relation to life in cities- examples from African cities.
4. To learn how to communicate ideas clearly through short written responses, write well-organized, well-developed essays and oral presentations that reflect appropriate use of language and technology.
5. To demonstrate how knowledge gained from 1,2,3,4 can be applied to generate architectural design interventions for students’ ongoing thesis projects
Course Instructor:
Dr. Josephine Malonza
Architectural Findings and Programming
The findings of the architectural research are something new for the researcher in the topic and theme of the research. This finding includes both approval and disapproval of the architectural components and compounds those recognized as the most important items in the other studies and projects. The key findings of the research guide and lead the researcher to construct the Design Framework table to demonstrate and illustrate the application of those findings into architectural concept and design. Indeed, the design framework explains how different key-findings can be implemented as design strategies, tactics, and actions. All illustrations in the design framework lead students to arrange programming, conceptualization stages. The programming should answer to the design strategies and tactics.
Architectural Project Definition
The architectural problem statement should frame, explain, and clarify a real architectural problem such as missing, non-fitted, deteriorated project in the specific area of the country to solve the problem with architectural-design-solution.
Therefore, the tile of the thesis projects can be included three substance in general. First, the title of the project should address a project that missing in a particular area to support the development plan of the country such as health, educational, public services, housing, or commercial buildings, site, or centre (as an example project of tourism village in 2017-2018). Second, the title of the project can be a revision, revise, reaction to a wrong constructed, under-construction, or designed projects that it included some critics based on the deviation of the project from the objectives, users, or context. In this kind of projects, the researchers should re-program, re-plan, and redesign the project based on the depth critical thinking to elaborate better idea as an instant of this project (Project of the School of Architecture in 2015-2016). Third, conservation projects that targeted to fix the project in better condition such as renovation, rehabilitation, and conservation-preservation are themes of those projects (Gikondo vitalization project 2016-2017).
After approval of the theme and topic by the thesis committee, according to the title of the thesis project, students should explain the architectural statement of the problem as the thesis proposal (Borden & Ray, 2000). Thesis proposal includes all part of chapter one of the thesis that it present as a proposal with recommended literate and the methods in the whole research (Ellison, 2010). After approval of the proposal, the students should start the structure of the research by chapter one as the Architectural Problem Statement. The problem statement should be supported with some documentations through the development plan sources and the person visiting and interviewing to address the specific architectural problem that the thesis candidate is going to deal with that. For this reason, it is highly recommended to look for a real case, missing aspects, and adapted map (Frayling, 1999).
Architectural Studies
In this part, students should develop their own idea through deep studies on other projects, theoretical productions, and historical critics. This part should result to a theoretical framework to should what are the most significant architectural elements, aspects, and items in the theme of the research those should be taken into account by the researcher in the whole study. Current books, journal articles, and speeches are highly recommended to apply in this chapter.
6.4.3 Architectural Methods and Analysis
Students in the part should select the most adapted methods and techniques (Groat & Wang, 2002) for the research based on the efficiency and sufficiency (Silverman, 2004; Silverman, 2010) according to those valid, reliable, and repeated (Neuman, 2006) among other researches and between researchers. Those methods are the most common methods and techniques to analyse the architectural components and compounds in chapter 4. Therefore, methods and techniques should extract through a deep study on methods that it calls as methodology. Data analysis includes four main part such as precedents analysis, context analysis, site analysis, and data analysis. These four parts support each other to achieve reliable findings for designing through scaling of the analysis form macro to micro-processes.
This module targets to shape the idea of the students for the project into a physical form. Despite the fact that the concept refers to a primitive stage of the design, the studies mentioned that the designer has an idea to solve the problem in all stages of the designing. Therefore, the conceptualization is the foundation for the design through design decisions.
The design decisions are those logical thoughtful analyses take the place in the mind of the designer to meet the specific needs of the project, client, or supervisor. Conceptual design is supposed to provide a basic form of spaces for the development of the project. The concept for the thesis project not only includes the general form of the mass of the project but also includes the primitive concept of the plan, elevation, and section of projects.
In this perspective, the module targets to engage the students in the different layers and aspects of the design with the conceptualization stages through the sketching and drawing of the different piece of the project continuously to form the general form of the project gradually.
This module taught to 5thyear architecture students examines urban life at different times and places. As more of the world’s population settles in cities, the sites of anthropologists have increasingly shifted from rural to urban settings. The goal of the course in this class year is to unpackthe forces that act to shape and change cities and urban life as well as the resulting policy responses invented to solve the problems associated with the changes in order to improve the vision for the future city. The course further questions how anthropologists can better represent the life worlds of urban dwellers and what anthropological insights and methods could contribute to our deeper understanding of urban phenomena.
Major emphasis is given to the ethnography of city life and its relationship to the practical applications of the final year thesis research that the students will be undertaking as well. Using literary works, historical studies and ethnographies of case studies, the course hopes to present coherent and readable syntheses of theory, methods, and analysis of various urban issues and experiences of urban life. This in turn assists the thesis students to better conceptualise their topics and sharpen the focus on the inter-relationships that their projects make with the future city.
The content of this course consists primarily of three questions: 1. What is a city? And How are cities understood? 2. How have social and economic histories shaped the layout and structure of contemporary cities? Major events affecting urban life in life And 3 What is the future for the city?
In order to answer these main questions, the module has been structured in three steps;
(1) introductory and selected narrative chapters from recent ethnographies that provide in-depth anthropological study of particular urban issues in cities around the globe, with specific attention to cities in Africa
(2) short journal articles on specific topics relevant to understanding urban issues with contextual examples and
(3) supplementary material presented by the Instructor during class lectures and discussions.
Students are also required to search for and read research literature relevant to their community based-learning based ethnographic fieldwork projects.
Additional readings may be assigned based on student interest and requests.