https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/SOCL5768?type=COREThis course proposes a theoretical and thematic review of the city-form in the Middle East, Europe and the US. Investigating the dialectic between social processes in cities and cities as social processes, we will discuss the prominence of cities as social and sociological problems. The course falls into two parts. The first examines the analytic vocabulary and theoretical assumptions that have constructed cities as objects of study. This part follows the classics of urban studies (Weber, Simmel) and the Chicago School, through socio-spatial approaches to new modes of theorization (the Los Angeles School). Special attention will be paid to the construction of urban communities and cultures and to the emergence of phenomena such as gentrification, hyper-ghettos, gated communities, urbicide and domicide. The second part of the course will focus on specific city types from a critical historical and ethnographic perspective. Such cases include the ethnically mixed city, the (post)colonial city and the Mediterranean city. At the crossroads of conflicting global interests and cultural images, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the global south continue to challenge the political and anthropological imagination. Dominant understandings, however, are shaped by powerful essentialist tendencies: Orientalist stereotypes, religious reductionisms and nationalist ideologies. All of these interpretive paradigms, in popular as well as in much of the scholarly discourse, project and reify a view of the Middle East and the "South" principally as sites of either religious authenticity, nationalist extremism, cultural autochthony or poverty. Symbolically mapped through spatial key-metaphors of the "holy cities," such as Jerusalem, Mecca and Najaf, the Middle Eastern space is heavily associated with the "sacred" (with its discourses of eschatology and redemption), while simultaneously being fixated as "stagnant," "traditional," and "despotic." This course construes the Middle East, the European South and the global urban ghetto as an anthropological and historical laboratory, inviting students to explore through cities central debates in the social sciences about such themes as modernization, colonialism, nationalism, "fundamentalism," cosmopolitanism, gender and patriarchy. Structured along these themes, the course problematizes the relations between the "urban" and the "regional," while utilizing them as a lens into broader theoretical inquiry.