Geography

This course examines remote sensing tools and techniques and their application within the earth, environmental and urban environments. It focuses on the processing, analysis and interpretation of data collected by government and commercial satellites, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and aerial photography. The course introduces image interpretation, multispectral images, supervised and unsupervised image classification and change detection. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. Geography, gender, and ethic is an advanced course of cultural geography. The course provides in-depth and critical knowledge of topics and perspectives that lie at the core of contemporary geographical debates, such as gender studies and ethical issues. The course provides an understanding of these subjects and perspectives within today’s geographical debates as well as the intersection of these topics and other fundamental topics in the field of cultural geographies, such as mobility. The course addresses two main thematic pathways: 1) contemporary evolution of feminist and gender debates in the geographical field. 2) the intersection between gender geographies and ethics. The topics addressed include: feminisms, methodology, and ethics in geographical research; concept of positionality; contribution of feminist and gender studies to ethical issues concerning, for example, subjectivity, difference, and the overcoming of culture/nature; feminisms, transfeminisms, and more-than-human and posthuman geographies; geographies, feminisms, and concepts such as "trans-species"; and ecofeminisms.

In this course, students work and understand the territorial reality, in a specific case of interaction with the environment. Participants use the anything-goes methodological pluralism to co-design and co-build tools adjusted to territorial contexts, capable of being used by communities in research, action, and dissemination processes, on expanded problems.

In this course, students critically review the inter-relationships between rural environments and the forms of planning intervention that take place within them; evaluate the institutional arrangements for sustainable long-term rural planning and environmental management; and explore the provision and management of recreational opportunities in rural areas.

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others.

This course offers a study of the theories and methods of human geography based on review of the main works and authors in contemporary geographical thought.

This course explores the evolution of humanized spaces and their depiction in cartography across history and delves into the intricate relationships between populations and social landscapes. It examines the dynamics of urban spaces, from processes to structures, and the diversity of rural environments. Additionally, this course analyzes how economic activities shape territories and their implications on spatial organization. 

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.