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Welcome to our 2nd season!

About the series

The aim of this series of lectures is to explore the universalizing and parti-cularizing tendencies in contemporary cities. That is, the “glocalized” process of urbanization in which facing glob-alization, cities in different parts of the world take different forms and structures reflecting their local cultures, traditions and histories.

 

In our previous season we had five fascinating meetings, was You can view them here >

In our upcoming season, four virtual meetings will present four different cities: Rio de Janeiro, Chennai, Tokyo, and Venice. Each City will be introduced by a local scholar, followed by comments from collogues and a discussion.


You are welcome to join us! 

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Comparative Urbanism

The local dimensions of cities

The 21st century is termed 'The Age of Cities'. Decades of fast and intensive process of urbanization culminated in early 21st century: For the first time in human history, more than half of the world's population is living in cities. The process is advancing fast and the estimations are that world society is approaching a future state of ‘singularity’ in which “… the notion of where a city begins and ends physically is no longer relevant.” [1]. This process of urbanization is associated with a parallel process of economic, social and cultural globalization of world society.

 

The conjunction between globalization and urbanization entails the impression that by becoming more global and urban, the society of the world is becoming also more uniform; that the old cultural differences and socio-spatial tensions have gone as we are all experiencing the same global-urban reality. On the other hand, however, the process of globalization is associated with a parallel and complementary process of localization when the conjunction between the two gave rise to the notion of glocalization – a linguistic hybrid of globalization and localization. First presented in 1995 by Robertson [2], glocalization refers to the co-existence in contemporary everyday life of global universalizing tendencies together with local particularizing tendencies [3].

 

The suggestion here is that contemporary cities and urbanism are of no exception. The aim of this series of lectures is thus to explore the universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary cities. That is, the “glocalized” process of urbanization in which facing globalization, cities in different parts of the world take different forms and structures reflecting their local cultures, traditions and histories.

  1. M. Batty (2021). The End of Empire and the Age of Cities. Presentation in the International conference on The crisis of  Democracy in the Age of Cities. https://urban0204.wixsite.com/mysite/abstract-batty

  2. R. Robertson (1995), Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash, R. Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities (London: Sage), pp. 25-44.

  3. U. Dessi and F. Sedda (2020). Glocalization and everyday life. Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 2020, 3,  DOI: 10.12893/gjcpi.2020.3.14

Join
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Join the 2nd series !

You will receive the Zoom link for the meeting to the email you register with

Contact

Contact

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TAU City Center

Research Center for Cities and Urbanism

Tel Aviv University

Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 6139001, Israel

  

urban@tauex.tau.ac.il >

+972-3-6405718

Visit our website >

 

Organizers

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City Center

Research center for cities and urbanism,

Tel Aviv University

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The S. Daniel Abraham Center

for International  and Regional Studies

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