Geography

The course commences with an overview of contemporary CC/EC discourses, debates, the evidential base and international governance initiatives to address the challenge, including IPCC reports, UNFCCC and Stern, as well as regional and national-scale reports. It then examines the nature of urbanism and urbanization as linked networks and systems of urban areas embedded within multiscalar hinterlands. This provides the context for detailed examination of how urbanization and urbanism contribute to CC/EC; how CC/EC is affecting, and is predicted to affect, towns and cities in different regions, and how urban authorities and diverse groups of urban residents experience, perceive and respond to the phenomenon. Key concepts and literatures assessed include disaster risk, vulnerability, resilience, mitigation, adaptation, transformation, global(ized) urbanism and teleconnections, and the claimed conflict between tackling climate change and meeting immediate development needs.

This course discusses the historic evolution of rural spaces in Mexico and the world and the origins of problems facing the Mexican countryside. It focuses on policies in various countries around the world and their effects on global agrarian structures. This course analyzes methods of information management about rural areas in Mexico and the world and global trends related to rural organization in the future.

This course offers an overview of the history and recent transformations within the field of cultural geography including contemporary theories and practices. The four thematic units are: the objects of cultural geography; nature, landscape, and cultural geography; culture, territory, and identity in a global world; space, difference and power, and geographies of inclusion and exclusion.

This course covers theories and processes of contemporary urban development from a critical political economy perspective, addressing urban problems and policy responses in our rapidly urbanizing world. The course examines what urbanization means to the state, to (global/domestic) businesses, and ordinary citizens, focusing on a selected set of key themes that are pertinent to the understanding of urban injustice. Such themes may include, but are not limited to, the understanding of the (social) production of unequal urban space, global circulations of urbanism, gentrification, displacement, and dispossession. Case studies are largely drawn from a diverse range of cities across the world, providing opportunities for students to contest urban theories that have largely been rooted in the experiences of the advanced economies.

This is a research-led and research-based course, providing an introduction to the fields of cultural and historical geography. It has a slightly different emphasis to other courses because it explores some of the philosophies and methodologies used to create cultural and historical geographies, and is designed to give students the experience and confidence to undertake their own independent research using UCL’s museum and archive collections. The course encourages students to think critically about questions of representation, different kinds of materials, forms of analysis, and engage with questions of politics and ethics.

This course introduces students to geographical scholarship that has sought to explain, understand, and critically analyze the manifold relationships between space and society in different contexts. The course familiarizes students with innovative geographical research exploring issues such as, for example, environment and uneven development; culture, the global, and the local; transnationalism and migration; gender, race, identity; politics, the state, and regions; empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism; nature, materiality, and non-human agencies.

This course explores the relationship between landscape-scale spatial patterns and the ecological, physical, and social process that drive environmental change. It then applies this to real-world problems to achieve sustainable landscapes in the context of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and social-ecological outcomes.

The course develops an awareness of the structure and function of tropical forest ecosystems and provides an intellectually stimulating understanding of the biophysical, ecological and anthropic processes which characterize these environments. To develop an awareness of the human impacts on these important systems and the kinds of geographical tools available for monitoring, modelling, and mitigation of the worst effects of these impacts. 

The course examines contemporary social theoretical explanations of the salience of risk within so-called "late modern" society.  The course then explores the factors that shape the politics, processes, and outcomes of risk governance, as well as the factors that shape public perceptions of environmental risk and the associated problems posed for policy-makers, businesses, and other stakeholders in communicating risk issues.  The course finishes with reflections on the future management of environmental risk issues.

This course begins with exploring how digital technologies have proliferated every aspect of our daily lives, around work, travel, leisure, consumption, production, and reproduction, in ways that are simultaneously virtual and material. This focuses on how digital technologies, infrastructures, devices, logics, and methods are blurring the divides across analog and digital spaces. It then looks at how digital technologies can simultaneously break down and reinforce inequalities along class, race, gender, sexuality through new "digital divides." Finally, it examines the implications this has for producing new forms of digital citizenships and claims to social and spatial justice.