Urban Studies

This is an advanced course considering the economic forces that govern the geographic distribution of economic activity and its implications for economic outcomes and public policy issues. The course is divided in two parts. The first part develops a simple theory of cities as the result of the interaction between agglomeration and congestion forces. It proceeds to study in detail the agglomeration forces that attract firms, consumers, and workers to cities, as well as the congestion forces that limit the size of cities and how to overcome them through transportation networks and housing markets. The second part of the course extends the basic model to study a system of many locations, the dynamics of city growth and decline, and to conclude, the role of cities and geography for climate change.

This course examines cities rich in cultural heritages and develops a theoretical framework to understand the development of city culture for city destinations. Through field trips to the main cultural attractions in a city, students are required to analyze the development plans and marketing strategies for these destinations. This course will be Integrating current concepts, research findings and several best-practice case studies, students will gain an understanding of the highly broad and complex web of the culture resources in China. 

This course invites students to ways of reading London. Students read London literary texts from the early modern period to the present day and encounter the city through walking, travelling along its transport connections, listening to guides, looking around them and engaging self-reflexively with the meanings and imperatives found in the city. The course includes walking lectures, seminars, and workshops and develops skills of close reading, observation, critical thinking, and effective communication.

The International Internship course develops vital business skills employers are actively seeking in job candidates. This course is comprised of two parts: an internship, and a hybrid academic seminar. Students are placed in an internship within a sector related to their professional ambitions. The hybrid academic seminar, conducted both online and in-person, analyzes and evaluates the workplace culture and the daily working environment students experience. The course is divided into eight career readiness competency modules as set out by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which guide the course’s learning objectives. During the academic seminar, students reflect weekly on their internship experience within the context of their host culture by comparing and contrasting their experiences with their global internship placement with that of their home culture. Students reflect on their experiences in their internship, the role they have played in the evolution of their experience in their internship placement, and the experiences of their peers in their internship placements. Students develop a greater awareness of their strengths relative to the career readiness competencies, the subtleties and complexities of integrating into a cross-cultural work environment, and how to build and maintain a career search portfolio.

The course provides the latest methodological and theoretical tools for understanding the politics of urbanization and urbanism. The course takes the politics of urbanism as a transdisciplinary arena. It encourages thinking across disciplinary boundaries to address the environmental and social challenges of the present. The question of how cities act politically on the global scale is widely discussed and receives diverse answers from researchers. The course suggests that the study of the political agency shall be grounded in urban studies and empirically tested on different layers of policymaking, allowing for hybrid combinations. An urban studies approach addresses the spatial and temporal specificity of urban processes, in contrast with the "methodological nationalism" of large parts of the social sciences. It focuses critically on spatialized social processes and socio-material assemblages, combinations of objects and agencies that affect how cities are organized and, to some extent, governed.

This course focuses on sociological concepts and methods through the lens of the city. It applies sociological concepts to the city that can be seen while walking around, such as the city of buildings and people; and those less noticeable, such as the city of sentiments, conflict, traffic flows, bike messengers, sewage networks, asset prices and municipal taxation, and animals and nature. This course uses key sociological readings, case studies, and topics in the news to study the city as a complex space where buildings, people, animals, laws, policies, and international financial flows intersect to produce our lived experience. It focuses on close reading of texts, understanding the key argument of each text, and applying concepts to the real world; and covers the key strategies and skills of academic writing as students produce a research paper based on a city of their choice. The first part of the course explores foundational texts, while the rest of the course addresses specific questions related to housing markets, social policy, violence, drugs, environmental change, segregation, urban infrastructure, and urban regulations.