Dr Gareth A. Jones, S506

For students taking MSc Urbanisation and Development, MSc Regional and Urban Planning Studies, LSE-Sciences Po Double Degree in Urban Policy, MSc Development Studies, MSc Development Studies (Research), MSc Development Management, MSc Human Geography (Research) and MSc Environment and Development. Other suitably qualified and interested graduate students may take or audit the course with the permission of the teacher responsible.

The course considers the role of ethnography to how we understand cities. We will look in detail at different types of ethnography and compare with other means of representing the city, through the novel and film, starting with Rem Koolhaas on Lagos. Specific themes will cover the urban flâneur and ethnographer, the slum and marginality, sanitation, dirt and race; modernism and nostalgia; bodies and sex; gates and danger; the street, the gang and violence. The course will consider the role of ethnography in developing world cities in particular but also draw from studies of developed world. The course offers an opportunity to reflect on urban places in a way which does not reduce them to arenas for technical, policy-driven planning, and so as to consider the urban experience more broadly. The course will raise issues of methodology.

10 two-hour lectures and discussion in the LT.

A 2,500 word essay and a critical reflection on one week's readings for discussion in class.

No single book or small group of books covers the material adequately. One or two key ethnographies will be suggested for each week supplemented by a more general reading list. A. Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence and Democracy in South Africa, 2005; J. Auyero & D. Swistun, Flammable: environmental suffering in an Argentine Shantytown, 2009; J. Biehl, Vita: life in a zone of social abandonment, 2005; P. Bourgois. In Search of respect: selling crack in El Barrio, 2003; P. Bourgois and J. Schonberg, Righteous Dopefiend, 2009; F de Boeck, F. and M-F Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City, 2004; D. Gandolfo, The City at its Limits: taboo, transgression and urban renewal, 2009; D. Goldstein, The Spectacular City: violence and performance in urban Bolivia, 2004; D. Goldstein, Laughter out of Place: race, class, violence and sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, 2003; U. Hannerz, Soulside: inquiries into ghetto culture and community, 1969; A Huyssen (ed), Other Cities, Other Worlds: urban imaginaries in a globalizing age, 2008; S. Jensen, Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town, 2008; P. Kelly, Lydia's Open Door: inside Mexico's most modern brothel, 2008; A. Prieur, Mema's house: on transvestites, queens, and machos, 1998; L.A. Ring, Zenana: everyday peace in a Karachi apartment building, 2006; E. Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India's 'Emergency' in Delhi, 2003; S. Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day, 2008; L. Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 2008; A. Wilson, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global city, 2004.

A 5,000 word essay (100%).