SO451      Half Unit
Cities by Design

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Cities by Design examines the relationship between built form and practices of city design, through situating it in its political, cultural, economic and social contexts. By introducing students to key concepts, sites and practices in spatial analysis and city-making, the course investigates the production of urban space and how the design of our complex urban environments affects the different people who live in them. We engage in the spatial shaping of intersectional social identities - including gender, ‘race’ and class - and position modernisation, capitalisation and colonisation as ongoing spatial processes to understand the material, symbolic and experienced conditions of power. Drawing on architecture and the designed world as key reference points, we explore interconnections between urban theory and practices of design, drawing on examples of different cities and varied ways of knowing the urban from across the world. We analyse processes of inequality, marginalisation and resistance alongside design methods of observation, visualisation and evidencing. Our weekly seminars incorporate both the analysis of case studies and readings.

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

This course is usually delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in WT.

Essay

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

Written feedback is given within two weeks of the essay submission, and in addition a writing seminar is incorporated in the course in preparation for the summative assessed essay.

• Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till. 2013. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge)
• Bayat, Asef. 2013. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, 3rd edn (Stanford: Stanford University Press)
• Boano, Camillo, and Cristina Bianchetti (eds.) 2022. Lifelines: Politics, Ethics, and the Affective Economy of Inhabiting (Berlin: Jovis)
• Gabauer, Angelika et al. (eds.). 2021. Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies (New York: Routledge)
• Goh, Kian, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Vinit Mukhija (eds.). 2022. Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City (Cambridge: The MIT Press)
• Hall, Suzanne, and Ricky Burdett (eds.). 2018. The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City (London: SAGE)
• Jacobs, Jane M. 1996. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London and New York: Routledge)
• Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Oxford and New York: Berg)
• Valladares, Licia do Prado. 2019. The Invention of the Favela, trans. by Robert N. Anderson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press)

Presentation (25%)

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

Essay (75%, 5000 words) in May

The first assessment is a group presentation, where respective groups present in the assigned seminars in the WT.

The essay will be due in the ST.

Attendance at seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.