Urban Studies

More than half of the world's population today live in urban areas, and this share is expected to increase. Modern cities are highly complex political and economic systems. But with the complexity also comes the challenge of how to organize them well. This course applies concepts and theories across philosophy, politics, and economics to the challenges of urban living. The course is divided into two parts. The first part will introduce students to the key theoretical debates relevant to the socio-political organization of the city. Students investigate whether living in the city is qualitatively different to living elsewhere. During the second part of the course, students apply this theoretical knowledge to concrete problems and case studies: urban informality, sanctuary cities, housing, residential segregation and proposals for urban independence.  

The key goal of this course is to appreciate different "modes" and "lenses" of urban thinking and their relationship with urban policy practice, and to understand how to source and interpret different types of urban expertise in relation to complex urban challenges.  Whilst cities have in the past years been an exciting locus of experimentation, and the promises of the "smart city" agenda as well as a city gender lens have fast risen to wide popularity in urban research and policy, there remain many areas in which complex urban challenges test our contemporary understanding of the "urban age." The course engages with urban change-makers working across academic research (in UCL and beyond) and public and private sector institutions. 

This course explores the changing relationships between health, lifestyles, and the city in both historical and contemporary contexts across the Global North and South. Focusing on a wide range of case studies, the course will critically examine the emergence of the idea of "lifestyle" as an explicit public health concern and, in addition, an object of geographic analysis. The creation of lifestyle as a problem to be addressed comes as part of a wider acknowledgement of the capacity of certain features of urban landscapes to perpetuate the risk of certain "lifestyle" conditions such as obesity that result from an amalgam of factors including sedentary behavior and poor diets, perpetuated by the risks presented by the places in which people live, work, travel, and play. 

This course explores the relationships between urban form and formation: how insights from urban morphology and morphogenetic processes that created existing urban form can better inform the creation of future urban form through planning, design, and more informal urbanism. This involves study of different urban form components and patterns at different scales – buildings, spaces, streets, and districts – and how these are created in relation to each other to generate overall urban form. 

This course explores the spatial manifestation of urban dynamics. Over half of the entire world population now live in cities and this proportion is estimated to rise further. This means urban space, as an intensified, technologically augmented, and rapidly changing space, is the basic setting of living for most human beings. Also, this “built-environment” not only has become our direct, first-hand environment in our everyday experiences but also has significant natural-environmental implications.

This course examines the nature of “urbanity” as it is spatially played out, and its economic, political, environmental, and human rights implications, specifically keeping in mind the possibility of more democratic control of urban space.

The subject of this class is the modern period of urban space, especially in relation to the changes in the human-material relationship since the 19th century. It is mainly related to technological changes in the 20th century, but it also deals with the spatial implications of recent innovations such as artificial intelligence and smart devices.

This course examines contemporary city development trends, policies, and practices across the globe as explored against the backdrop of culture and technology. Includes hands-on learning.

This class introduces the core concept of contemporary resilience theory to provide students with a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating social-ecological resilience. Key ecological planning concepts and strategies, including green infrastructure planning, ecosystem services, and nature-based solutions, are designed as part of module for fostering students with capacity to bridge concepts and practice for nature-based resilience planning. This course emphasizes learning from doing, and will combine lectures, case study, field work, and team work for presenting planning proposals. 

The focus of the seminar is the concept of reconstruction in the field of architecture and urban development, an essential term when dealing with loss and destruction in historical urban structures. In addition to the decision or debate between monument preservation and new planning, the course also discusses the crucial role of political, social and identity authorities in these design processes. By reading theoretical and official texts, analyzing international case studies and visiting Berlin case studies, students gain insights into the diversity of theories and methodological approaches to reconstruction in modern and contemporary architectural practice and monument preservation.

This course examines the challenges of increasing travel demand, impacts on people, process of policy formulation, structure of governmental control, engagement of stakeholders and evaluation of performance. With reference to the case of Hong Kong, the evolution of the planning process and the development of policy instruments are illustrated. To provide a future outlook, an overview of recent trends and near-term prospects within the wider context of sustainability for delivery of transport services is introduced.

This course is primarily based on a flipped-classroom approach. Students complete the theoretical readings before class; in-class time is then devoted to discussion and to learning social science research methods (ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, and questionnaire surveys). The course introduces the notion of public space not only from a theoretical perspective, but also through the observation of practices and behaviors in urban public spaces, including the gendered dynamics. Throughout the course, special attention is given to fieldwork conducted in student groups in a Parisian public space. Drawing on political philosophy, sociology, geography, and urban studies, the course examines the multiple meanings of public space.