The course examines the changes concerning public space, architecture, art and their interchange in the 20th and 21st century: the passage from the resident to the citizen and the impact of the ‘transformation of the public sphere’. The course attempts to elucidate the epistemological and theoretical ground on which new analytical approaches in connection to the political aspects of architecture, can be developed towards a new radical social construction. Particular emphasis is given to understanding of the complexity of globalized architectural practices focusing on a social transformation that addresses the unequal gap between the local and the global, North and South, gender identities, public and private and dichotomies that construct our perception on the politics of space. Issues of gender, art and architectural claims, conventions and practices that define the concept of public space and various technologies of the self are methods and mechanisms to look into architecture and art theory in the broader political field, starting from the early 20th to the beginning of the 21st century. The approach of the course does not give precedence to public versus private space, to large versus small scale and gestures but addresses all aspects of architectural and artistic thought and action and beyond Eurocentric theories and ideas and Western examples and examines the contemporary shift of architecture, art and urbanism in the interdisciplinary fields of critical geography, anthropology, social and political sciences.

A list of relevant texts will be given in order for the students to study and present in relation to their own final project.