Immeasurable Cities

This course considers spatial practices that travel beyond, above and below disciplinary boundaries of measurement. How do we measure cities? What would it mean to think about cities through the very things that architecture fails to represent? By and large, African cities—and more broadly, cities in the Global South—have been dominated by discursive and spatial regimes of quantification that facilitate ongoing practices of extraction. This seminar examines specific tactics of legibility and abstraction, in the visual and conceptual arts, that represent cities and spaces without measure. We will meditate on concepts, environments and practices that are illegible to the broader fields of architecture, urban design and planning; spaces that are always already fleeting. This requires developing transdisciplinary knowledge of black studies, decoloniality, contemporary art, and cultural geography. We will consider multiple forms of measurement, classification, and bordering, that consolidate power and negate the lives of racialized, gendered, and discounted bodies.