As term is about to start, I wanted to resume posting some lecture summaries of my Global Cities class. Some of the most interesting set of lectures were the ones on sub-Saharan Africa. When we, as a primarily “northern” audience, pick the continent to study slums, it is important and natural to reflect on our inherently problematic viewpoint. Are we, in other words, “slumming it”?
Dharavi, Mumbai
Using Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi for my Global Cities class is a double-edged sword. I wonder whether it offers a “fair” representation of life in the city.
Delhi, 2014
I started teaching a class at Temple University Japan called Global Cities this term. It is a General Education course that introduces students to contemporary aspects of urbanization around the world. A few thoughts on the class and teaching methods after the jump.
Kampala, Uganda
This is a strange time in one’s academic career I suppose. With the PhD just handed in, pending final approval by my university’s committee, I am beginning to think seriously about where and what to publish. Below some initial thoughts that will hopefully guide me in my next steps. Continue reading
Fatherhood and the final stretches of my PhD have taken a toll on my posting performance here. Hard to believe it’s been more than half a year since the last blog post. Long gone seem the days when my aim was to have two entries up each week. I do intend to continue writing here, especially to get some structure into my post-PhD thinking as well as reflect on my teaching. A few updates and ideas after the jump.
Several classes at the beginning of the Metropolitan Tokyo course I teach at TUJ are dedicated to establishing a context for analyzing the Japanese capital. I comment on these lectures after the jump.
This is the first post in a series of summaries of and notes on my lectures for “Metropolitan Tokyo”, a class that I teach at Temple University Japan. I have written more about it here.
I have been teaching at Temple University’s Japan campus for more than a year now and still haven’t written anything on this blog here to reflect on this amazing experience. This shall now change with some thoughts on the most recent course I teach called “Metropolitan Tokyo”.
TUJ’s Azabu Campus
Comparisons across cities are notoriously hard. For one, data availability is a huge problem given our methodological bias on the nation state. But there is also the problem on how we delineate municipalities. Nonetheless, I found this graph on city size and inequality very interesting.
Click here for original
I wanted to share and briefly discuss a great graph on income inequalities in Tokyo and Osaka that I found. It has been compiled by the NLI Research Institute and shows interesting variations across the 23 wards.
Click for original Continue reading
