Nitin Bathla: Catalogue data in Autumn Semester 2023 |
| Name | Dr. Nitin Bathla |
| Address | Schmid, Christian (Tit.-Prof.) ETH Zürich, HIL E 64.2 Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5 8093 Zürich SWITZERLAND |
| bathla@arch.ethz.ch | |
| URL | http://www.nitinbathla.com |
| Department | Architecture |
| Relationship | Lecturer |
| Number | Title | ECTS | Hours | Lecturers | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 052-0703-00L | Sociology I  | 2 credits | 2V | C. Schmid, I. Apostol, N. Bathla | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | Sociology I investigates the relation between social developments and the production of the built environment from a macro-sociological point of view. It examines central aspects of social change, historical and contemporary forms of urbanization, and typical examples of models of urbanization. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | This series of lectures should enable students to comprehend architecture in its social context. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | Sociology I deals with the macro-sociological point of view, and investigates the relation between social developments and the production of the built environment. In the first part central aspects of social change are examined, –in particular the transition from Fordism to Neoliberalism and the interlinked processes of globalization and regionalization. The second part deals with historical and current forms of urbanization. Among other aspects, it focuses on the changed significance of the urban-rural contradiction, the processes of suburbanization, periurbanization, and planetary urbanization; the formation of global cities and metropolitan regions; the development of new urban configurations in centres (gentrification) and in urban peripheries (edge city, exopolis, new urban intensity). In the third part these general processes are illustrated by typical models of urbanization: Manchester, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris and Zürich. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | A detailed collection of original texts will be distributed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 063-0701-23L | Methods of Urban Research: Extended Urbanisation | 2 credits | 2G | C. Schmid, I. Apostol, N. Bathla | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | While architects, planners, and urban designers have engaged with the city, the analysis of urbanising territories ‘beyond the city’ have been a blind spot. This lecture series attempts to close this gap by discussing with researchers who will present methods, experiences and findings from a great variety of territories of extended urbanisation. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | The lecture series “Methods of Urban Research: Extended Urbanisation” presents the methodology of sociological analysis of territories of extended urbanisation. These territories, which have traditionally been beyond the sensorium of architecture and urban design professions provide important terrains for urban practice. The lecture series will bring together researchers that have been part of a long-standing research project on territories of extended urbanisation. They will present a kaleidoscopic overview of the diverse methods and insights into international research on urbanisation processes in large metropolises and in territories characterized by extended urbanisation. Most of the presented case studies are published in the brand new book “Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles”. Semester performance will be assessed on the basis of a written group assignment on extended urbanization (approximately 10 pages, in groups of four). For the assignment - describe and analyse an example of extended urbanization in a geography of your choice. The example may be from Switzerland or from any other region of the planet. Based on scientific literature and other data, conduct a critical analysis of the chosen case study, and discuss the consequences of urbanization of this area for its people and the environment. Develop a possible urban strategy for alternative inclusive development. Summarize your findings through a A3-sized poster. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | Introduction: Christian Schmid Contesting the dispossession of Land and Nature. The Peripheralisation of Arcadia - Metaxia Markaki The Horizontal Factory. The Operationalisation of the US Corn and Soy Belt - Nikos Kastikis Losing Sea. Abstraction and the End of the Commons in the North Sea - Nancy Couling The Mine, the City and the Encampment. Contesting Extractivism in Eastern Amazonia - Rodrigo Castriota Palm Oil and Extended Urbanisation in the Malaysian Hinterland - Hans Hortig Urbanisation en Route. The Lagos-Abidjan Corridor - Alice Herzog Extended Urbanisation in Guateng, South Africa - Lindsay Howe The Extended Urbanisation of Bejing - Yiqui Liu The Highway Revolution. Enclosure and State Space in India - Nitin Bathla Concluding Discussion | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 064-0017-23L | Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal methodologies for Landscape and Urban research | 2 credits | 2K | F. Persyn, N. Bathla, T. Galí-Izard | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abstract | Researching Otherwise is a call to craft another space for the production of knowledge. It posits that fluid epistemologies that respond to ways of decolonial, pluriversal, and more-than-human knowing can offer tools and ways for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds and transcending developmental paradigms of researching and operating. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Learning objective | Research in landscape and urban studies just like in other disciplines has been subject to the act of border and boundary-making that mediates, conditions, and limits its horizons while determining its outcomes. Some of these borders and boundaries are more familiar than others. In terms of geographical boundaries, for instance, the global north-south boundary has haunted landscape and urban research shrouded under the narratives of developmentalism. However, there are other borders such as the disciplinary ones, which attempts to separate and isolate a domain from other similarly specialised disciplines. This according to Paul Feyerabend is due to the tendency of modernity whereby ‘scientific education, aims to simplify “science” by simplifying its participants.’ Then there are the methodological boundaries established due to ‘cartesian dualism’, which act in the practice and training of becoming objective, teach researchers to be content with studying the products of imagination rather than working with imaginative processes themselves. Then there is a third, onto-epistemological border which defines that the knowing subject in the disciplines is not transparent and disincorporated or untouched by the geopolitical configuration of the world in which people and regions have and continue to be ranked and configured racially. It argues for moving away from a one world ontology. Decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Gloria Anzaldúa have proposed for border thinking as a method for politically and epistemically de-linking from the web of imperial knowledge, which has energised a number of disobedient and anarchic traditions of researching otherwise. Researching Otherwise is a call ‘to craft another space for the production of knowledge – another way of thinking, un paradigma otro, the very possibility of talking about “worlds and knowledges otherwise”’. It posits that such ways of decolonial, pluriversal, and more-than-human knowing can offer tools and ways for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds and transcending developmental paradigms of researching and operating. Rather than rigid and closed epistemologies of knowing the landscape and the urban, this seminar promotes fluid epistemologies that respond to the incommensurabilities, radical alterities and other ways of knowing the environment. The call for researching otherwise is to deploy methodological tools such as drawing, photographing, sounding and listening, filmmaking, walking, and cartography for not only unearthing and unmasking systems of power and domination but also for researching possible other worlds and for countering the disembodiment of research and the researcher. The seminar will draw upon readings from a forthcoming publication by the same title. In terms of format, it will alternate between inputs by invited guests, reading and discussion sessions, tutorials, and peer-review. A number of input lectures by invited guests will will take the participants of the seminar into ways and methods of researching otherwise. These input lectures will be alternated with thematically organised tutorial sessions and peer-review. The seminar participants can choose to present the work developed during the seminar at the LUS Doctoral Crits organised at the end of the semester. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Content | The format will provide an overarching methodological meta-theme, to be defined prior to the event. One external guest critic will be invited. In this case, each presentation will conclude with a discussion round, providing sufficiently detailed feedback for every doctoral candidate. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Lecture notes | 22.09 Researching Otherwise - Nitin Bathla 29.09 Walk through the brachen of Zurich - Sabrina Stallone 06.10 Imagining Otherwise: Social Movements for Livable Futures in the Sonoran Border Region - Darcy Alexandra 13.10 Transdisciplinary Action Research - Stephanie Briers 20.10 Extended Urbanisation Conference 27.10 Retreat Lively Cities colloquium with Maan Barua at Uni Liechtenstein 03.11 Publication Otherwise - Moritz Gleich & Jennifer, gta Verlag 10.11 Doctoral Colloquium 17.11 Comparative Research - Julie Ren 24.11 Border Forensics - Charles Heller 01.12 Sensing beyond the human - Nancy Couling 08.12 Doc Crits | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literature | Barua, M. (2014) ‘Bio-geo-graphy: Landscape, dwelling, and the political ecology of human-elephant relations’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(5), pp. 915–934. Crysler, C.G. (2003) Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment, 1960–2000. London: Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203402689. Eco, U. (2015) How to write a thesis. MIT Press. Geertz, C. (1973) ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 1973’. Hultzsch, A. (2017) Architecture, travellers and writers: Constructing histories of perception 1640-1950. Routledge. Jackson Jr, J.L. (2013) Thin description. Harvard University Press. Jon, I. (2021) ‘The City We Want: Against the Banality of Urban Planning Research’, Planning Theory & Practice, 22(2), pp. 321–328. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2021.1893588. Kennedy, H. (2019) ‘Infrastructures of “Legitimate Violence”: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder’, Grey Room, pp. 58–97. Madden, M. (2005) 99 ways to tell a story: exercises in style. Penguin. Malm, A. (2013) ‘The origins of fossil capital: From water to steam in the British cotton industry’, Historical Materialism, 21(1), pp. 15–68. Malm, A. (2016) Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014) ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative’, The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), pp. 62–69. Marcus, G.E. (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual review of anthropology, 24(1), pp. 95–117. Narayan, K. (2012) Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. University of Chicago Press. Queneau, R. (2018) Exercises in style. Alma Books. Shannon, K. and Manawadu, S. (2007) ‘Indigenous Landscape Urbanism: Sri Lanka’s Reservoir & Tank System’, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2(2), pp. 6–17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2007.9723384. Soja, E. (2003) ‘Writing the city spatially1’, City, 7(3), pp. 269–280. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1360481032000157478. Tornaghi, C. and Van Dyck, B. (2015) ‘informed gardening activism: steering the public food and land agenda’, Local Environment, 20(10), pp. 1247–1264. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prerequisites / Notice | The participants of the seminar will be required to participate in two doctoral colloquiums; on Extended Urbanisation on 20.10 and on Lively Cities on 27.10. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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