Conflict Urbanism: Language Ecologies explores the role that language plays in shaping urban space. Language interacts with its environment at multiple scales and with diverse media. As an ecology, language either dominates, or is vulnerable to its host environments. In this way it often makes conflict visible in urban settings.
This course provides an introduction to critical mapping theory and geographic information systems tools. Of particular interest to Humanities students, we will address both historical and contemporary questions of space and mapping. Through the use of open-source GIS software (qGIS) and data (OpenStreetMap) students will learn how to critically use mapping tools and geographic data for spatial analysis and representation.
This seminar focuses on infrastructure as a major force in shaping cities, as well as a medium through which the politics of urbanization is visible. Our work will address historical comparison and the politics of mapping by focusing on three cities and three continents – Mumbai, Johannesburg and Medellin. This is the third in a series of multidisciplinary Mellon seminars on the topic of Conflict Urbanism, as part of a multi-university initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities.
In this article for Architectural Design, Laura Kurgan discusses the Conflict Urbanism: Aleppo project and its sometimes puzzling findings. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet, Aleppo now lies in tatters. This devastation of a designated World Heritage Site is a poignant example of the human and cultural cost of armed conflict – in this case the Syrian Civil War. The Center for Spatial Research has analyzed satellite imagery and reports from the ground to assess the damage in Aleppo.
Conflict Urbanism: Language Justice is a seminar to explore how urban spaces are shaped by their linguistic diversity. With a focus on New York City and the estimated 700 languages spoken here, this course examines the results of extreme linguistic diversity and the effects of so many languages coming in to contact and conflict.
To mark its inaugural year, The Center for Spatial Research will present its work on "conflict urbanism" in Aleppo, and Colombia. The event will engage participants in a discussion about the role of conflict in structuring urban space and the politics of representation in zones of discordance, disruption and violence as it contributes to the making and remaking of cities.
The Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Corrections is an online tool for mapping the residential distribution of people involved in the criminal justice system. It uses aggregated address data to map the flow of people being removed to prison, reentering communities from prison, and the standing population concentrations of people under parole or probation supervision.
Ninety percent of all goods worldwide are moved by ship, but shipping is mostly invisible. More than 300 million Metric Tons of energy are shipped in and out of the United States each year, in 60,000 shipments. This project presents the ports and paths of the 2.7 billion Metric Tons of energy shipped through more than 90 US ports from 2002 - 2012. Using data assembled by Thomson Reuters, Port to Port maps global oil shipping routes as well as other forms of energy navigating ocean territories to and from the United States. Using D3 as an interactive web platform we designed a map interface that is scaled globally while embedded with local stories about energy movement from port to port. Data can be viewed across time, which reveal changes in patterns of movement as the geopolitics, price of oil, and conditions at specific ports change.
Conflict Urbanism: Aleppo is a call for inquiry and a call to action. It is an open-source, interactive, data-rich map of the city of Aleppo, at the neighborhood scale. Users can navigate the city, with the aid of high resolution satellite imagery from before and during the current civil war. It is also an invitation to students and other collaborators to record and narrate urban damage in Aleppo — at the cultural, infrastructural, or neighborhood scale — and to present that research in case studies which will be added to the website over time.
The first in a series of multidisciplinary Mellon seminars on the topic of Conflict Urbanism, conducted as part of a multi-university initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities. This Spring 2016 seminar focuses on Aleppo in Syria. Conflict Urbanism is a term that designates that cities are not only destroyed but also built through conflict.
