Abstracts of Papers

Helmut Berking:
Local Frames and Global Images: Hierarchy, Negation, and the Diffusion of Urban Knowledge

Focussing on scholarly models of urban theory, the paper aims at examining the construction, the decontextualization, the diffusion, and finally the relocation of urban knowledge. After a brief review concerning the particular impact of the Chicago School of urban anthropology on urban discourse in Europe, the main topics will be 1) the "global city" concept, especially its misleading adaption as the new image of the New Berlin in the early '90s and 2) the transatlantic transfer, the ongoing use and abuse of the category of a "new urban underclass" as a universal phenomenon, although its symbolic value derives exclusively from the cultural particularities of US society. Finally, the question has to be asked how these processes of diffusion affect the local stocks of cultural knowledge and at the same time how these concepts are changed via localizing practices.