GY206      Half Unit
Urban Geography and Globalisation

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

Students must be prepared to participate actively in both lectures and class sessions. Students must also be prepared to do a small amount of public speaking at the end of term, when assessed individual presentations take place with a specific timed format.

This course introduces students to the intersection of urban geography and the geography of globalisation, with the aim of understanding key references in academic debates, and their relevance for real-world social, economic, and political issues in our cities today. The course offers a critical, human-geographical perspective on ‘global cities’, how these manifest in different parts of the world, how they matter for distinct realms of urban life, and how we can study features of global urban geography. Themes include empires, development, and cities; ‘global cities’; ‘Third World cities’ or ‘cities of the global South’; urban spaces of neoliberalism; new geographies of urban theory; and planetary urbanisation. We examine cases related to migration, sexual minorities, the circulation of ideas, and gentrification. Examples come from both the ‘global North’ and the ‘global South’, with the aim of helping students understand when and how these categories may be useful.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

In the Department of Geography and Environment, teaching will be delivered through a combination of classes/seminars, pre-recorded lectures, live online lectures and other supplementary interactive live activities.

The formative work will be an essay plan that directly prepares students for the summative work.

Black, Stephanie (director). 2001. Life & Debt. Tuff Gong Pictures Production.

Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. 2002. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism.’” Antipode 34(3): 349-379.

Brown-Saracino, Japonica. 2010. The Gentrification Debates. London: Routledge

Buckley, Michelle. 2013. “Locating Neoliberalism in Dubai: Migrant Workers and Class Struggle in the Autocratic City.” Antipode 45(2): 256-274.

Centner, Ryan and Manoel Pereira Neto. 2021. “Peril, privilege, and queer comforts: The nocturnal performative geographies of expatriate gay men in Dubai.” Geoforum 127: 92-103.

Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.

de Certeau, Michel. 1984. “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dorries, Heather. 2023. “Indigenous Urbanism as an Analytic: Towards Indigenous Urban Theory.” International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 47(1): 110-118.

Harvey, David. 1989. “Fordism,” in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kern, Leslie. 2020. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso.

Le Galès, Patrick. 2024. “The Rise and Fall of the Sociology of the Global City.” Annual Review of Sociology 50: 647-669.

Oswin, Natalie. 2018. “Planetary urbanization: A view from outside.” Environment & Planning D: Society & Space. 36(3): 540-546.

Portes, Alejandro and Bryan Roberts. 2005. “The free-market city: Latin American urbanization in the years of the neoliberal experiment.” Studies in Comparative International Development 40(1): 43-82.

Robinson, Jennifer. 2002. “Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map.” International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 26(3): 531-554.

Roy, Ananya. 2009. “The 21st -Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory.” Regional Studies. 43(6): 819-830.

Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Second edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Presentation (15%)

Course participation (20%)

Essay (65%, 2500 words)