Seminar SoSe 2019
Prof. Dr. Philipp Misselwitz, Dr. Elke Beyer, Lucas-Andres Elsner

Architectures of Circulation: Urban infrastructures of global commodity production

The production and distribution of all sorts of goods is increasingly organized within global networks. Complex infrastructural arrangements connect dispersed logistics areas and production locations within cities and urban hinterlands worldwide, enabling the circulation of commodities and the exploitation of spatial difference from the urban to the planetary scale. These infrastructure systems have massive impacts on urbanization processes and the urban form by creating splintered landscapes of connectivity, altering or reinforcing patterns of sociospatial inequality.

This seminar explores the spatiality and architecture of physical infrastructures enabling commodity flows, their operating modes, local and translocal urban impacts. It offers an introduction to key theoretical debates on infrastructures of connectivity and urbanization through a series of readings in architecture and urban studies, political economy, human geography and anthropology, covering different geographical contexts in the Global South and North. Students will also develop individual case studies on specific infrastructure buildings/ spaces, commodity circuits and their (trans-)local interplay with urban development in small group research and mapping projects. Through the engagement with the case studies and scholarly literature rooted in different strands of critical theory the seminar aims to build a sensitivity regarding the socio- economic relations and power structures embodied in the built infrastructures of commodity production and circulation.

The seminar will be conducted with close links to the research projects "Transnational Production Spaces" (2016-2019) and "Infrastructures of Global Production" (forthcoming) at the Habitat Unit