SO480      Half Unit
Urban Inequalities

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course offers a critical introduction to key issues and processes in the study of urban inequalities, placing contemporary processes of urban growth in the context of another major urban trend: deepening patterns of inequality in many cities across the world. It examines the continuing role of ‘older’ bases of urban inequality – class disparities, gender inequity, ethnic and racial discrimination, legal exclusion and informality – as well as significant emerging patterns, including extreme concentrations of wealth at the top, segregation and spatial secession, environmental harm and insecurity. It also examines the complex of ways in which urban inequality is experienced, not only in terms of income or property wealth but also in consumption inequalities, inequities in access to housing, transport, urban services and legal protections, spatial disparities and environmental risks and injustices. The course considers the range of social, economic, environmental and political factors that shape, and also might help to address, urban inequality in different international contexts.

The course will:

• provide a critical introduction to current patterns of urban inequality
• consider the production of urban inequalities through social, economic, political, legal and spatial processes
• explore common themes and critical differences across cities in high-income and developing economies
• address key debates in a range of urban disciplines and situate these in specific urban contexts and examples

Key themes

• Urban growth and the growth of inequality
• Wealth, income and inequality
• Social inequalities in the city: gender, race and legal exclusions
• Spatial injustice: segregation and access
• Environmental harms and vulnerability
• Property, informality and shelter inequities
• Governing inequality

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

Essay (2000 words)

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

Chant, S. and McIlwaine, C. (2016) Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South. Abingdon: Routledge.
Desmond, M. (2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American city. New York: Crown.
Miraftab, F., Wilson, D. and Salo, K. (eds) (2014) Cities and Inequality in a Global and Neoliberal World. London: Routledge.
OECD (2018) Divided Cities: Understanding Intra-urban Inequalities. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264300385-en.
Roy, A. and Al Sayyad, N. (eds) (2004) Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Short, J.R. (2018) The Unequal City: Urban Resurgence, Displacement and the Making of Inequality in Global Cities. London: Routledge.
Tilly, C. F. (1999) Durable Inequality. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
van Ham, M., Tammaru, T., Ubarevičienė, R. and Janssen, H. (2021) (eds) Urban Socio-Economic Segregation And Income Inequality: A Global Perspective. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64569-4

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in January

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