SDG Detail

A4890 Conflict Urbanism

Postgraduate course

Project description

Our seminar will examine the ways in which hurricanes, debt, and migration are major forces which produce and shape spatial inequalities in contemporary Puerto Rico. We will approach Puerto Rico as a network of conflicting forces, demands, and discourses (economic, spatial, political, environmental, historical, memorial, mediatic, aesthetic), and compare the Puerto Rican context with other intensive politicized spaces. What does Puerto Rico have in common with New Orleans Post Katrina? With the Dominican Republic or Singapore? Prior to Hurricane Maria, what did San Juan have in common with Detroit or Miami? To do our work we will draw on and work with diverse sources of information including data about population displacement, urban destruction housing values and foreclosures, and reports and analysis of �expert� bodies such as FEMA, Puerto Rico�s government, and the United Nations. We will consider how local and global organizing is challenging spatial inequalities, ��and will reformat this information in a way that exposes some alternate images of Puerto Rico prior to these disasters and present some new post-disaster visions of it. Our seminar involves thinking and action from some very new perspectives which engage multiple methods of learning and engagements.