Which Way the City?
This virtual tour through a selection of global cities in these web portfolios. Two analytical dimensions focus our critical lens: vernacular and
transnational urbanism (in architecture, commerce, consumer products, jobs, ads, ways of living, cultural practices, etc). Cross-cutting these, two spatial dimensions
draw our attention within the built environment and social/cultural flows of global cities: slums and dreamworlds of neoliberal urbanism. We adopt virtual tactics for
walking-in-the-city, positioning ourselves as transnational flâneurs tacking between the urban inequalities of slums and skyscrapers to ask: WHOSE
CITY IS IT?
Each Virtual Global Cities project is dedicated to a particular world city in the Global South, and integrates virtual ethnographic documentation, visual images, scholarly literature, and critical interpretive analysis to guide the user.
University students majoring in many different fields created these web portfolios. We are not (yet) expert urbanists, and our results may be a bit uneven; we range from freshman to seniors, and a sprinkling of graduate students, and here we hone our skills in research, writing, critical analysis. Through this collaborative project, we discover that our comparative gaze offers some astounding insights about global cities. Taken together, we hope you'll agree that the synergy between our individual projects amounts to a sum much greater than its parts.
ENJOY!