Urban Studies

This course explores the political and artistic aims and effects of non-theatrical performance in the 20th century and contemporary urban environment. It explores how the city is sometimes conceived as a dystopian site of potentially enormous social oppression. And it examines everyday, artistic, and activist performative responses to this potential subjection, responses which imagine the city as, instead, a utopian site of personal and social liberation. Students contextualize and historicize our analysis through studying various theoretical analyses of urban experience (e.g. Baudelaire, Benjamin, Debord, Lefebvre) as well as a variety of artistic practices (e.g. everyday interventions, activism, public art). Throughout the course, students work to map the ideas and practices we encounter, many originally grounded in Paris, in our own experiences of London. The course concludes by imagining what performance might do next to contest the particular challenges of living in the city now and to explore and exploit its opportunities.

This course introduces the spatial effects the law has in everyday life's urban spaces, problems related to geography in general, and cities in specific. It examines the relationship between space and law, and how law and legal theory are essential starting points in understanding cities and vice versa. The course also confronts legal and social theories using architecture, literature, film, art, and legal ethnographic approaches. It addresses inquiries such as how law creates space; how national and international laws construct cities; how law, literature, and film represent cities; and how it is possible to do legal research in this field.

The course reviews agglomeration and clustering of economic activities from both geographical and urban economics disciplinary perspectives, in relation to cluster and urban economic policy. The course explains the current innovative and knowledge economy of firms and policymaking in relation to urban competitiveness. The geographical discipline focuses on clusters, network formation and industry evolution using institutional theories in which the actor-approach of firms and governments is central. Urban economics traditionally focuses on the role of externalities and urban contexts as attractions for firm and population location decisions and the growth and innovation potentials of firms in a more quantitative sense. Both disciplines heavily lean on empirical research, using complementary research methods like case-study research, surveys, spatial econometrics and general equilibrium modelling. Those methods are explained in the course in relation to current issues and empirical research on urban development. Much attention is given to regional and urban economic policy issues. Participants apply the theoretical and empirical insights from the lectures in an actual case study of urban policy in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

This course provides students of planning and other urban-related undergraduate courses with an introduction to transport studies, including key transport planning concepts, policies and the relationship between transport and urban planning. The course provides insight into ‘doing’ transport planning, to help prepare for further study or work in the planning and/or transport sectors. Students study key transport concepts such as flow and capacity, both practically through fieldwork and calculations, and through the transport policy and planning literature.

This course examines cultural, literary, and social histories of urban space in Madrid in order to question how the city contributes to shaping identities—cross-cut by gender, sexuality, social class, ethnicity, citizenship, etc.—and in turn, how the urban milieu is negotiated by them. The course takes the contemporary city of Madrid as its point of departure, in comparison with Paris, New York, London, the suburbs, etc., and examines case studies that address the entanglements among urban spaces, politics, and identities from modern and contemporary history. The material is organized into four thematic units: I. (Dis-)Identifying with Identities: identity politics & communities of difference today; spatial identities & non-places; identity politics in recent social movements; Spanish Nationalism and its transgressions in the 20th century. II. Questioning the Public and Private: gender in 19th century society and the home; masculinity, femininity, and homosexual cultural codes in the early 20th century public; reclaiming public space after dictatorship; camera surveillance in the democratic era. III. Desirable Cities, Desiring Cities: consumer desire and the origins of advertising; the surrealist and situationist critiques of urban life; urban decay, revival, and neighborhood struggles against gentrification in defense of the ‘right to the city.' IV. Sensing the City: Memory, Affect, and the Unseen: cultural heritage and historical memory in the urban landscape; Fear, terrorism, security in the city and the suburbs; citizenship, consumerism, and its ‘others'; digital dystopias.

This course introduces the rationale for, and process of, the emergence and growth of Singapore's built environment from a third world country to a world class city. It enables students to have an understanding and appreciation of the economic and social aspects and implications of how properties and infrastructure are developed and managed, given the constraints that Singapore faces. It also encourages them to develop alternative views on how the built environment can help Singapore continue to prosper and remain relevant in the region. 

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.