Interdisciplinary Introduction to African Urban Studies

The main idea for this course will beto use Accra as a way to illuminate cities of the students'own choice.This meansthat the course will be inherently comparative andfeatures of Accra will be usedto ignite students¿understanding of details of the urbanin general.Features of other African cities such as Cairo,Lagos, Kinshasa, and Johannesburg will beintroduced primarily through literary, anthropological,and other humanistic texts. And spatial concepts such asspatial morphology, spatial traversal and the means of locomotion, space-time anamorphism (for science fiction), topoanalysis (from phenomenology), and chronotopes(from Bakhtin)will be progressively introduced and applied to different urban features. The course will be a combination of classroom discussions and various fieldwork walking and bus tours of Accra. These will help to further ground the spatial concepts they will have been introduced to in class.There willalsobetrips to the Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, old seats of the European trading presence on the Gold Coast/Ghanaand sites of the slave trade.