Urban Studies

Addressing urban change and apprehending the complexity of cities demands a distinct interdisciplinary approach across the arts, sciences, social sciences, and humanities, each bringing their own theoretical and methodological perspectives to bear on a phenomenon that has traditionally been studied from within disciplinary silos. This course acknowledges the complexity of cities as distinctive material environments for social life, raising questions of how the different dimensions of the built (and imagined) urban environment permeate everyday experiences of the contemporary city. 

This course focuses on the French art of strolling aimlessly through the city from the late 19th century to present. Exploring the intersection between the city walker and the urban environments navigated on foot, this course provides a unique perspective on the role of public space in the construction of urban modernity in France. The course adopts an explicitly class-, race-, and gender-critical approach to the study of this able-bodied practice that has traditionally been associated with a certain Baudelairean archetype of bourgeois masculinity. The course investigates who has the right to linger and be seen in public space, how the act of strolling aimlessly through the city intersects with other forms of societal privilege, and when and where wandering becomes a means of protest or resistance. By tracing the itineraries and embodied geographies that are traversed in this practice, this course creates a map of social mobility and urban modernity in the ever-evolving French city.

This course surveys the growing subfield of urban political ecology. In particular, it focuses on the material and social flows of ‘stuff’ that circulate to, through, and beyond the city. Water, sewage, electricity, garbage, plastic, carbon, and much more are all pumped, diverted, quarantined, cleansed, financed, regulated, produced, and consumed via cities. This ‘metabolism’ of material things produces varying qualities and outcomes of urban life. These flows and their outcomes are the course’s central focus, framing as urban metabolism the complex, uneven, and surprising journeys, infrastructures, transformations, politics, histories, labor, and expertise required for these flows. Drawing on a diverse set of academic, journalistic, video, textual, and audio course material, the course traces the pathways of material things through cities and their hinterlands worldwide, unpacking how their flows are constructed and regulated, financed, and managed, and contested and politicized.

This innovative course introduces students to important and emerging issues in urban cultures and societies in the opening decades of the 21st century. At its core, it explores the interaction between culture, space, and people.  To do so, the course explores developments in three important global cities: Seoul, Shanghai, and Edinburgh. Students engage with both textual and non-textual materials, including films, TV shows, music, webtoons, and design. Although the course is built round the cases of Seoul, Shanghai, and Edinburgh students learn how to situate the cases in a broader comparative perspective, within Asia and in Europe. This course draws on conceptual and analytical tools from the humanities and social sciences. The course introduces students to key concepts in urban studies. Next, it familiarizes them with a select number of contemporary developments in Seoul, Shanghai, and Edinburgh. The later part of the course is more practice-oriented, as students carry out a small research project in the city of Edinburgh, before reflecting on the possible links with the other cities.

This course focuses on understanding the relationship between terrorism and urban space. It traces the impact of terrorist attacks on cities and urban, cultural, political, religious, public, and economic areas in the strategies of terrorist organizations. The course discusses the method of terrorism to manipulate and change urban spaces and the counter-terrorism strategies and policies aimed at rehabilitating the damage. Three cities will be the primary examples in this course, among others: New York, Paris, and Mosul. The course provides an introduction to global digital governance and highlights the importance of understanding how internet technology functions, is evolving, and being governed. It examines how the digitization of the world is impacting our societies and economies, and what rules this trend may imply.

This course explores the changing roles of cities in an age of globalization. The first part examines cities as part of urban networks at the national, regional and international levels, and focuses on the implications arising from the rise of mega-cities and global cities. The second half investigates the challenges facing cities on the ground, including issues of the revitalization and re-imaging of city cores, changing retail landscapes, and the impact of telecommunications on the location of urban activities and peoples' mobility.