Urban Studies

This course examines the idea that the contemporary production of urban space restricts the rights of many urban dwellers to inhabit, develop, and otherwise shape the cities in which they live and work. Drawing especially on the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre (alongside other "metromarxists") the course contrasts the way that cities serve the interests of financial powers, developers, and property owners with the forms of urban exclusion, alienation, and marginalization experienced by those who are oppressed by virtue of their class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or gender. Though consideration of different struggles for urban space, the course explores important questions about how people should make claims to urban space, and explores the political potential of the demand for "the right to the city."

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.