Geography

What can individual citizens contribute to making cities greener and more ecological? Will a concept of a climate‐friendly and healthy city grow over this ‐ in the truest sense of the word? And how specifically can urban and private areas be gardened? What are private and municipal strategies for dealing with urban gardens and their implementation? What are the costs to cities of private urban gardening? Which horticultural and which structural engineering aspects have to be considered? Which psychological and healthy effects does a green city have on its inhabitants? What kind of biodiversity exists in green cities? These questions form the thematic framework of this course. The questions are dealt with and answered within an interdisciplinary framework.

This is an advanced course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. There are three versions of this course; this course, “GEOGRAPHIES OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177A and Bologna course number 81952, is associated with the LM in History and Oriental Studies degree programme. One of the other versions, “GEOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177B and Bologna course number 95931, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme. The final version “GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT,” UCEAP Course Number 176 and Bologna course number 19695, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme.
Climate change offers the opportunity for a multidisciplinary analysis. The course discusses various aspects of the topic through a primarily geographical approach. The course is structured into three parts. Part one introduces climate change as a global phenomenon, with its natural and anthropogenic root causes. Students discuss and reflect on the socio-spatial inequalities inherent in the climate crisis. Part two analyzes climate governance, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Post Kyoto adaptation and mitigation strategies. In addition to the policy-making process, the course critically examines theoretical frameworks of adaptation, notions of climate justice, and intersectional approaches to addressing the climate crisis and its colonial roots. Part three concerns climate change and mobility. The course examines the complex interconnections between climate change and (im)mobility. Empirical examples are drawn from the #ClimateOfChange [https://climateofchange.info/publications-press/] interdisciplinary research project to contextualize the climate crisis as it is manifested, resisted, and understood from diverse locations across the globe. At the end of the course students show understanding of some of the global challenges the population of the planet has been facing since the second half of the twentieth century. Among these, the critical relation with the natural resources and with the concept of development and, above all, climate change, with its connections to territorial development, ecological risk, food security, and the consumption of natural resources. At the end of the course, the students have acquired the theoretical and empirical tools to critically analyze the global strategies of climate resilience and cooperation and the relation between climate change and tourism.

The course enables students to develop an understanding of contemporary dimensions of citizenship as a way of thinking through how these shape and are shaped by cities.  This understanding includes an awareness of the different kinds of primary, secondary, and gray sources available for the study of cities and citizenship. The course uses case studies from the global North and South to explore the political, economic, social, and cultural processes that shape cities and citizenship as connected sites of people's sense of identity and belonging.

Geographies of food are considered principally through long-run and contemporary shifts in the framing of food practices; through shifting power-relations in food networks; and through debates about conceptualizing food-network powers and interests. Animal geographies are considered as a key component in post-humanist, post-environmentalist enquiry in geography, drawing on the co-construction of human/animal spaces and places, practices of human/animal association, and moral and ethical debates from animal welfare to biosecurity. Examination of traditional and contemporary forms of animal representation are examined, leading to an assessment of ideas of hybridity, dwelling, and co-constitutionism.

This course addresses the global/local nexus in the production, consumption, and use of landscapes in the world today. The aim of the course is two-fold. On the one hand, it examines the ways in which different legacies of planning and design produce different types of what we call global or globalizing landscapes. On the other hand, it studies the ways in which the valuation, production, and consumption of these global landscapes as a form of economic, social, and political capital can play a role in planning and design practices. While discussing recent theories adopted in cultural geography, sociology, and (development) economics, the course focuses on the understanding of practices and processes in which planning and design can be played out differently with varied impacts. Case studies of global/globalizing landscapes drawn from all over the world play a central role in this course. Some themes explored in this course include the relationships between landscapes and evolving notions of global cities, heritage, international trade and policy, identity formation, refugee geographies, global health, human-animal relations, and conservation. The implications of each of these themes for the tasks of landscape architecture and spatial planning are explicitly made throughout the course.