Suspended in 2025/26
GY471      Half Unit
Urban environments and more-than-human cities

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

While cities are often depicted as inanimate and cold, made of concrete and steel, this course examines cities as lively, interconnected spaces. Rather than separating nature from urban spaces, this interdisciplinary course looks at how cities around the world are produced through socio-ecological processes, and how certain forms of nature are produced within the city. Cities depend on and foster diverse forms of life and communities that are often unexamined or remain in the background, yet are integral both for urban life as well as for the functioning of the global economy. Drawing from human geography, science and technology studies (STS), urban political ecology and urban studies, we will study cities as productive, creative and convivial spaces, as well as destructive spaces that can restrict life (both human and non-human). Themes that thread through these topics are questions of power and inequality; cities of the Global South and North and nature in postcolonial cities; the interdependence of life in cities; and the role of cities in both local environments and the global economy. The course will draw from ethnographies and documentaries of nature in the city to explore the complexities of urban natures and intertwined urban lives, with the option of a creative final assessment.

25 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

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

Students will be expected to produce 1 project in the WT.

The formative assessment is a short project proposal for their final project, outlining their topic and the methods they will employ, with the option of a longer proposal (up to 1000 words).

• Barua, Maan, and Anindya Sinha. 2023. “Cultivated, Feral, Wild: The Urban as an Ecological Formation.” Urban Geography 44 (10): 2206–27.
• Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Ginn (2017). Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia. London: Routledge.
• Hetherington, Ed. (2019). Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Narayanan, Yamini. 2023. Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Pitt, Hannah. 2015. “On Showing and Being Shown Plants: A Guide to Methods for More-than-Human Geography.” Area 47 (1): 48–55.
• Van Patter, Lauren E. 2023. “Toward a More-Than-Human Everyday Urbanism: Rhythms and Sensoria in the Multispecies City.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113 (4): 913–32.
• Dooren, Thom van, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23.

Project (100%, 4000 words)

The summative assessment is a final project/portfolio of 4000 words or equivalent with options for creative and multimedia projects (multimedia projects will include a shorter accompanying essay). The assessment will have different options to support student and staff neurodiversity as well as different types of skills that students may want to practice. Potential assessment options include doing an urban ethnography project or a multi-media project such as a photo essay or documentary on an urban environment project in London, with accompanying analysis. Students will be given guidance on the different options and will be assessed primarily on the content rather than the format of the assessment.