Storytelling and the City +
This is a course on urbanism and storytelling. In this course, cities will be discussed as composites of small forces of energetic selves, friendships and compassions. The energetic self here is the dimension of the self that drives one to undertake specific activities connected to one’s desires. These could include collecting strange objects, behaving like spies, writing stories, achieving mundane targets, opposing new ideas, making antennae to listen to strange sound waves, counting every tree, tracking obscure data, etc.
Such energies, expressed in absurd quests, unusual obsessions and bizarre interests cumulatively appear to be producing the city.
The city seems to acquire its generative energy from such small forces. In many ways the city seems to be a mad house and madness seems to be running it. Small forces also express themselves in everyday friendships and compassions. These practices go beyond the acts of routine and are considered unproductive in generating grand conceptualizations of cities, often discarded as stray individual preoccupations, anecdotes or subjective obsessions. While some of these are related to earning and occupations, others are simply ‘useless’.
Urban theory and pedagogy have seldom engaged with an understanding of these small forces or extended it for speculative / projective purposes. This course aims at exploring small forces through a framework of storytelling for understanding the mechanics of cities and speculating their future trajectories. The stories will be semi-fictional narratives of small forces.
The course is also interested in articulating the experience of emerging urbanity. It will engage in sketching the contours of this urbanity using small forces as the material.
The course is also interested in articulating the experience of emerging urbanity. It will engage in sketching the contours of this urbanity using small forces as the material.