Urban Studies

The course focuses on selected theories, discourses, and concepts for urban design. It encompasses visions and plans for the morphology of cities, the interplay with social and ecological sustainability, and ideas about the ideal city and good urban life from the 19th century through today. The course concentrates on three main themes of contemporary urban development: pre-modern to post-modern urban design, place making and the role of public space, and sustainable urban development and urban nature. It discusses central paradigms and various approaches to city design and re-design. The contemporary city is used to illustrate how urban design concepts and models have been operationalized and have influenced practice. 

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.

This course explores the processes shaping urban development in contemporary London and the challenges facing its role as a global city is the face of economic, social, and environmental challenges. Drawing on ideas, perspectives and approaches from social science and urban design, the course critically examines how London is responding to these urban development challenges through a sequence of related topics.

This course introduces the subfield of urban anthropology through the lens of politics, protest, and collective action that claims a right to the city. It explores how urban life is the setting and substance for the production of political agency, how the city is a medium of political communication, and thus how it constitutes a repository of dynamic but unstable political possibilities. The course takes a performative approach to city-making, in which the urban—what it means, what it is—is continually brought into being through the actions and arguments of its denizens, from Ultra football fans and disenfranchised workers to favela dwellers and guerilla artists. In particular, the course explores how the urban sensorium (the sounds, smells, and sights of the city) is a site of social and political intervention.

This course examines the distinctive role of “field trip” in understanding and researching the city we live through a series of guided tours. It stresses that engaging urban issues ‘out there’ is more than a complementary tool of collecting data, but also a reflexive practice that enables affective learning, changing our preconceptions, inspiring us to consider possible interventions. Selected tours covering cutting-edge urban development issues in town are provided to demonstrate the diverse functions of field-based learning in different urban milieu. It will examine the changing concepts of the ‘field’ in future city, and how we can represent urban problems by organizing a framework of destinations and experience.

Cities have become major actors on environmental policy. However, the crosscutting nature of environmental problems involves the city in a web of relationships with other levels of government and non-governmental actors. Therefore, the understanding of environmental policy in cities raises the need to unveil the “black box” of the different dimensions of governance (urban, metropolitan, multi-level). The aim of the course is to introduce students to the complexity of implementing public policies in urban contexts through the particular complexities of the environmental issues. For such purpose, the course addresses the basic concepts of policy analysis, the different discussions and theories on governance and orients them towards the specific case of environmental problems in different contexts. Particular attention is placed on air quality, mobility, and climate change.