Suspended in 2025/26
GY479      Half Unit
Urban Transformations

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This course introduces students to key theories and debates about societies undergoing rapid urban change. Course lectures examine large urban transformations in three ways. The first pertains to 'urbanisation' as a historical process by which social life, even outside of cities, becomes 'urban'. This means addressing the relationship between the country and the city, the idea of the urban in historical perspective, and the relationship between urban life in the global North and South. The second approach considers the city as a site for radical political change, as well as social experimentation in planning and development. This means studying cities as spaces of movement, resistance, and innovation, with an emphasis on urban experiments (especially in 'Southern' cities). Thirdly, urban transformation is analysed in terms of the explosion of theorisations about the nature of the urban, how to study it, and how to make a difference in 'the urban', both intellectually and materially, within a global economy. Through these three overlapping lenses – history, politics/planning, and theory – the course aims to equip students with a conceptual and empirical foundation for analysing city transformations and globalised urbanisation, with particular attention to emerging urbanisms in the global South.

Topics covered may include the following: industrialisation and immigration; processes of suburbanisation, ghettoisation, and gentrification; global cities; the colonial and postcolonial city; urban citizenship and the right to the city; urban uprisings; the geopolitics of urban theory; urban nostalgia; urban innovation and the politics of urban self-regard/self-representation.  

10 hours of seminars and 15 hours of lectures in the 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 produce 1 essay in the AT.

An optional short essay of 2000 words (maximum). Critically explore the applicability of one week's readings from the first 5 weeks of the course to an empirical case outside the course reading. This will be due in Week 7 of AT.

R. Beauregard. When America Became Suburban, 2006;

J. Brown-Saracino (ed). The Gentrification Debates, 2010;

T. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo, 2000;

M. Davis, Planet of Slums, 2006;

D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, 2012;

J.M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, 1996;

G. Moussawi, Disruptve Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut, 2020;

J. Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, 2006;

A. Roy and A. Ong (eds), Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, 2011;

T. Samara, S. He, and G. Chen (eds), Locating Right to the City in the Global South, 2013;

The reading list is intended only to be indicative of literatures broached in the course. Actual readings will consist of particular articles and chapters on a weekly basis, as well as a wider range of inclusions.

Course participation (10%)

Essay (90%, 5000 words)

Due in the first half of WT, the essay (5000 words, maximum) will be based on a range of questions provided by the instructor during AT. Some options will be very specific about certain issues and/or regions, whereas others will be more conceptual and open for student exploration. Across all these options, there will be wide enough scope for students with different academic backgrounds and thematic or geographical interests to be accommodated, while still hewing to the organising topics of the course.Attendance and active participation in seminar is also essential, and assessed. Students will be required to co-lead discussion with a peer and the instructor for one (out of ten) seminars.