Learning, Fragments and Unlearning: Knowledge and Making Urban Worlds

21 August 2023, 6.00 pm (CEST)
Logensaal, Logenstr. 11
15230 Frankfurt (Oder) and online via zoom, please register here: viadrinicum@europa-uni.de

Learning is a condition of urban life. The ways in which cities are learnt and the politics of whose knowledge is made to count has long been a preoccupation of critical urban research. But how does learning occur in the city? How might we think about its possibilities and limits? And what does it offer as an entry point to remaking urban words? Learning can lead to a new way of seeing the city and urban concerns, but it can also be partial, proceeding not in apprehended ‘wholes’ but in pieces and fragments. Those knowledge fragments are both caught up in a field of unequal power relations, and typically form the basis of change made in the name of ‘learning’. Thus, the idea of the fragment can help us make sense of what learning in the city is, how it proceeds, and what its politics are.

Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University. His work focusses on the experience and politics of cities. His recent books include Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (University of California Press, 2021), and an edited book entitled Global Urbanism: Power, Knowledge and the City (Routledge, with Michele Lancione, 2021).