Course description:
The course includes perspectives of social and political philosophers and architects on the issue of social inequality in cities and intimately related issues such as people’s quality of life and wellbeing. The assumed notion of cities contains an institutional component (a jurisdiction issue), a spatial component (an architectural issue of housing, density of buildings and citizens, a continuous district of settlement), and a cultural component (a particular state of mind which we call “Civicism”). The main aim of the course is to discuss a proposed model of measuring inequality in European cities (as distinguished from states), and then to suggest principles for policies meant to reduce urban inequality in cities in which the majority of people reside, and some of which enjoy budgets larger than most countries’ budgets. At the course the lecturers will argue for bottom-up moral and political reasoning that avoids both full paternalism and full populism while combining objective and subjective approaches. We will discuss the view that philosophy and architecture should begin with understanding the challenges to policy makers and architects (as creators of the cities) from which they should derive to develop and offer the models for improving the general quality of life. Special accent will be put on the developing the Dynamic Public Reflective Equilibrium as the optimal research methodology aimed to reduce political, economic, gender and other forms of inequalities in the city.
* ECTS points available for MA and PhD students. The requirements for ECTS credits are (i) participation on at least 80% of lectures, (ii) presentation of the original paper on the topic of the course/discussion papers on the papers provided by lecturers.
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