Giulia Torino

This course is available on the MSc in City Design and Social Science and MSc in Sociology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

This course has a limited number of places. For information on how to apply for a place on this course, please see Courses offered and related information.

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 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, design, social theory, and placemaking as key reference points, we explore interconnections between urban theories and practices, drawing on examples from different cities and varied ways of knowing and making the urban from across the world. We analyse spatial processes connected to inequality, marginalisation, resistance, peripheral urbanism, digital platforms, as well as everyday and alternative forms of worldmaking through the urban space, alongside design methods of observation, visualisation, and evidencing. Our weekly seminars incorporate both the analysis of case studies and in-depth readings, with a mixed format featuring lectures, seminars, discussions, student presentations, and urban exploration in London. 

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 one essay in the WT.

Written feedback is given within three weeks of the essay submission, and in addition a writing seminar is incorporated in the course to help students develop the formative essay into the summative (assessed) essay.

• Amin, A., and M. Lancione (eds.). 2022. Grammars of the Urban Ground. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Anand, N. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Awan, N., T. Schneider and J. Till. 2013. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Bayat, A. 2013. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press
• Escobar, A. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Hall, S., and R. Burdett (eds.). 2018. The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: SAGE.
• Hall, S. 2021. The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Pollio, A. 2026. Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital. University of California Press.
• Robinson, J. 2006. Ordinary Cities Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge.
• Roy, A. and Ong, A. 2011. Worlding Cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.
• Shafique, T. 2024. City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh. Bloomsbury.
• Simone, A. and Pieterse, E. 2017. New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting dissonant times. Cambridge: Polity Press
• Tonkiss, F. 2013. Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Presentation (25%).

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

Course participation (15%).

Essay (60%, 3000 words) in May.

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

The second assessment is individual contribution to collective discussion in class, in the WT.

The third assessment in an essay, due in the ST.

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