Learning from where? Pedagogies for an Urban Age - Professor Jane Margaret Jacobs

Organized by The Centre for the Future of Places, the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson foundation

"Learning from where? Pedagogies for an Urban Age" by Professor Jane Margaret Jacobs, Yale-NUS College Singapore

This paper reflects historically and pedagogically on the geographical imagination needed to understand urbanisation today. I begin by restating the case for why we need to use a comparative and transnational imagination when speaking about urbanisation today, drawing on the example of operational urban learning in post-independence Singapore. I end by reflecting on what this means for how we teach urban studies in and out of the class room.

Jane M Jacobs

Professor Jane M Jacobs’ research is in the field of urban studies, with a particular interest in cultural aspects of the production and consumption of the built environment. This includes research on the politics of heritage, the production and consumption of high-rise living, and professional cultures of city building (including architecture, planning and engineering). She works with a commitment to comparative and postcolonial frameworks, and with a qualitative and interpretative toolkit. Her urban studies publications include Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996), Cities of Difference (1998), and Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (2014). She has also published many peer review papers in journals and edited collections.

Prof Jacobs manages the pleasant confusion of sharing her name with the influential, but now deceased, urbanist Jane Jacobs, who authored the book Death and Life of Great American Cities. Because of this, she has become an expert in professional disambiguation.