Geography

This course examines the idea that the contemporary production of urban space restricts the rights of many urban dwellers to inhabit, develop, and otherwise shape the cities in which they live and work. Drawing especially on the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre (alongside other "metromarxists") the course contrasts the way that cities serve the interests of financial powers, developers, and property owners with the forms of urban exclusion, alienation, and marginalization experienced by those who are oppressed by virtue of their class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or gender. Though consideration of different struggles for urban space, the course explores important questions about how people should make claims to urban space, and explores the political potential of the demand for "the right to the city."

This course introduces the range of historical, political, and cultural frameworks that define the region of the Balkans. Guided by critical geopolitics and critical heritage studies, it maps the turning points and minor stories that make this region. The mapping exercise provides an opportunity to use multi-scalar and multi-temporal approaches and explore territories, practices, events, and communities from the mid-19th century to contemporary initiatives such as the Open Balkans. The course investigates the discrepancies between dynamics around the making of a region, and the spatial entanglements in the culturally and historically charged urban heritage sites. Through these places, it examines spatial categories, borders as part of everyday life, notions of politics of the past, heritage as a tool of geopolitics, and the democratic potential of heritage.

This course explores the impact of urban development on the natural environment and vice versa. It offers a study of the ecology and metabolism of cities and green urban design, using global and local case studies.