Does the word “urban” describe a geographic location or a condition? Does urbanization describe a universal and ubiquitous process with uniform and inevitable outcomes? How does this process intersect with capitalism, colonization, decolonization and modernization? If indeed the process of urbanization is defined neither by uniform outcomes nor by an inevitable telos, what accounts for difference and divergence in the localities we recognize and describe as “urban”? By the late twentieth century, it became de rigeur to remark that more than half the world’s population now lived in cities, a dramatic turning point in human history. Since then, a wealth of scholarship and policy documents have explored the many implications of this shift. Amongst others, these include a global housing crisis, dramatic increases in poverty, disease and conflict in densely packed urban locations and the impending environmental catastrophe to which urban growth has contributed significantly. These conditions also produce new social and political forms and actions, accelerating change, highlighting turbulence, uncertainty and flux. This course has three goals: 1. To provide students with the theoretical tools necessary to frame, locate and understand these conditions in a world where social and cultural life is now inextricable from the environmental and infrastructural conditions associated with urbanization. 2. To explore, through analyzing concrete case studies and real-life situations how to make sense of the tremendous complexity knotted into contemporary social life in and through its presumed overlaps with capitalist urbanization. 3. To situate and assess the links between the urban condition and architecture or, in other words between the analysis of uncertainty, speculation and flux and the praxis of designing, imagining and reshaping social life through material and virtual interventions.