GY449      Half Unit
Urban Futures

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

This course assumes that students already have a background in the social sciences and/or humanities as well as in urban studies. Exceptions will be made for students who can show that they are suitably qualified.

By now we are accustomed to hearing that, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. We may also be aware that more than one billion people now live in the informal settlements of the global South, and that this is where the majority of world population growth will take place. But what sort of futures are being imagined for the cities of the twenty-first century? In response to this question, GY449 Urban Futures will critically analyse how the future of cities, and the cities of the future, have been thought about and acted upon in different times and places. Students will learn to adopt a geographical and historical approach to urban futures by exploring how ways of envisioning the future of cities differ across time and space. Treating the future as a social, cultural, and political reality with a profound influence on the present, the course will examine how urban areas are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in anticipation of the city yet to come. Each week will be organised around a particular model for the future of the city (for example, the ideal city, the dystopian city, the modernist city, the colonial city, the capitalist city, the socialist city, the organic city, the global city, or the secure city). These models will be examined through concrete examples and will enable the discussion of broader theoretical perspectives in urban studies, with a specific focus on the critical analysis of urban futures. Though grounded in urban geography, this course will draw upon texts and other materials from anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, literature, film, philosophy, social theory, architecture, art, and city planning. Its primary objective is to equip students with sophisticated, critical ways of thinking about the future of cities, since doing so has real significance for the kind of city we want to, and eventually will, ourselves inhabit.

30 hours of seminars 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.

Students will be expected to participate actively in seminar discussions throughout the course, with occasional presentations and discussion leadership roles. Students will also be encouraged to submit weekly reading responses. Feedback will be provided during the sessions or via Moodle.

This is a reading-intensive course and each session will be dedicated to in-depth discussions of book-length studies. A detailed reading list will be provided at the beginning of the course, but will include works such as: Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (2018); Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji, Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (2016); Hiba Bou Akar, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (2018); Gökçe Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (2019); Erik Harms, Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon (2016); Danny Hoffman, Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia (2017); Natalie Oswin, Global City Futures: Desire and Development in Singapore (2019); Christina Schwenkel, Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (2020); Keeanga-Yamattha Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019).

Essay (100%)

Details will be discussed during class and guidelines will be provided on Moodle.