Goldsmiths, University of London, MA, World Cities and Urban Life

This programme provides an opportunity to engage with the following critical domains of contemporary urbanisation processes: The organisation of production and consumption processes; information dissemination and decision-support systems; political contestation and social control that conjoin, compose, deform and differentiate territories; populations and ways of life in trajectories that no longer can be conceptualised as matters of scale, sectors, disciplines, developmental stages, or states; the persistence of sentiments and power relationships that were once organised in the forms of colonialism and imperialism in both old and new ways that permit, even facilitate, the reciprocal penetration of highly diverse logics of accumulation, livelihood practices, and symbolic capitals so that any city embodies a singular range of constraints and possibilities; the proliferation of technical systems coupled with a prolific dismantling of mediations of all kinds, and thus limits on the proper use of things and bodies, which both generate new opportunities of individual and collective life, at the same time as potentially diminishing the platforms on which people from different walks of life could take each other in consideration; the complexities of relational systems which prompt intensive struggles over control of the terms and apparatuses that anticipate and calculate risk and speculate on the future.