Calcutta Research Group (www.mcrg.ac.in) will conduct an online orientation course on the city of our time, under the specific theme “Making and Unmaking of Cities”. This online certificate course will be held from 15 February to 31 March 2025. It will have twelve lectures (two lectures on Saturdays / weekends) encompassing accounts of making and unmaking of cities in South Asia and the world, issues of urban autonomy and sovereignty, struggles for rights and urban justice, as well as dominant stories that cities tell of themselves. Some of the discussions will be anchored in a political-economy perspective throwing light on forms of labour in global South, which include cities of South Asia. These cities as urban centres have always been sites of dispossession, eviction, migration, statelessness, relocation, forcible assimilation, mega projects, rising homelessness, and struggles for political reclamations. The online course will explore the process of urbanisation ideologically, sociologically, economically, and politically - cities that have been built and rebuilt in the wake of violence, epidemics, climate disasters, modernisation and planning, cities that are “futuristic” and smart, cities of refuge and creativity, cities expanding and containing their complexities and tensions, cities bulldozed and recreated, cities home to crime and labour mobilisation, cities trapped in narratives of tragedy, decline as well as progress, encountering their own fetishization, vanishing and mushrooming. "Making and Unmaking of Cities" is an online course designed to present radical engagements with urbanity and its excess.

The following six will be among the broad themes:

• City and Infrastructure
• Climate Change and the City
• Conflicts and Protests for justice in Urban Spaces
• Representations of the City in Transition
• Urban Divides
• Labour and Economy in the Making and Unmaking of Cities

Social scientists working on the city, leading urban activists of the region, planners, policy makers, and urban administrators, experienced persons engaged in creative work on the city, litterateurs, public health specialists, and data and communication specialists will form the faculty.

Applications are invited for enrolment in the course. Applicants may be research scholars, teachers, journalists, professionals, social, legal, media and urban rights activists.

Please apply through the google form link - https://forms.gle/rKequ9Yzud93qwzG6

Please Circulate Widely.