University College Roosevelt Academy Middelburg - Social Science

SSC 341 Power and Space

Content

In addition to studying the relations between people and their man-made environments, geographers also seek to identify how man-made environments express and reproduce relations of power. Landscapes and cities are built, transformed and instrumentalised in the pursuit of profit, status and power, and for these reasons, they are inherently political. In many respects, man-made environments and social structures are mutually constituting.

This course seeks to elucidate some of the ways ‘space’ has been implicated in, and shaped by, political and economic processes. The course will consider the intersection between space and power on a variety of scales: the nation, the region, the city, and the building. We will discuss power and space in theory and through a variety of practical case studies. Primarily, however, we will utilise the southern African case as an example of how power is mediated in and through space.

The course aims 1) to equip students with the analytical tools to consider man-made environments as expressions of larger societal processes; and 2) to provide an understanding of the ways powerful individuals, political leaders and governments have deployed planning and design theories and practices as a way to implement their visions of the physical environment, and of society as a whole.