Global Urban Futures

This course critically engages with contemporary global urbanization and ideas and imaginaries of the urban future. The course introduces students to key ideas in urban geography, as well as key sites in the history of urbanism, urban planning, and urban geography. Understanding cities and the environment as intimately linked – in complex, historical, and political ways – this course further introduces students to the relationships between cities, the biophysical worlds that underpin them through attention to themes of urban infrastructure, climate change, and environmental justice. Critically, however, this course introduces students to these dynamics in a global geography of contemporary urbanization. Situated in a world of cities, an understanding that most urban dwellers live far from the historic centres of urban thought like London or New York City, this course will introduce students to key contemporary urban dynamics around the world, but with a particular focus on the global south. In doing so, it will give students insight into patterns of global urbanization outside of the developed world, and engage creatively with the shape of the urban future that is to come. That we are living in an ‘urban age’ has become a common observation, but what that means in practice remains to be seen. What kind of city will mark the future, and where will it be located? This course will introduce students to key contemporary debates within global urban studies, with critical implications for thinking about urban life, climate change, cultural geographies, and environmental politics. 

The unit aims to:

• Introduce students to key dynamics of contemporary urbanization  
• Broaden students' understandings of urban theory and urban geography through attention to urban processes outside the Global North and away from the classical locations of urban thought/theory.  
• Develop students' critical understandings of key concepts and ideas in urban geography  
• Develop students' understandings of the politics of infrastructure, especially amongst cities in the Global South.  
• Develop ways of thinking creatively and critically about contemporary urbanization and development studies in ways that prioritize potential innovations and solutions for pressing environmental issues.

This course will be structured through weekly two-hour lectures and one-hour seminars. Students will be assigned key texts ahead of time, and will be encouraged to read additional recommended texts. The readings for the course will be wide-ranging, drawing from academic journal articles and books, popular media and long-form journalism, as well as audio and video resources. All course readings will be available through the University library.  

Lectures are interactive and will include discussions of the readings. Seminars will focus on assessment preparation, seminar-style discussions, and close engagements with course texts and materials. Regular attendance and engagement at both lectures and seminars is required to succeed in this module. 

• Describe and criticailly reflect on key drivers of contemporary urbanization and key dynamics and issues facing cities of the south.
• Evaluate and critique different theoretical perspectives on urbanization, infrastructural politics, and urban futures, as well as the contributions of geographers in understanding and analyzing contemporary urban, environmental, and political patterns facing cities
• Evaluate the importance of infrastructure to understanding contemporary cities and urban life through a number of distinct, geographically expansive case studies.  

• Communicate geographical ideas, principles, theories and concepts by written means

• Synthesise, distinguish and critically evaluate a range of arguments and evidence  
• Source, select and critically analyse appropriate materials for developing arguments and analyses

Formative Assessment Task:

Mock exam question practice - 30 mins

Feedback: Self-assessment with answers provided in class highlighting additional resources / signposting to support learning.

Summative Assessment Task:

**Coursework Essay - 1500 words - 50%

Feedback: Written feedback via Canvas within Faculty policy 

**Exam (in person) - 2 hours (or equivalent) - 50%

Feedback:  Written feedback on scripts early in the following semester.  

• Caldeira, T. P. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and  politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3-20.  

• Cohen, D. A. (2016). The rationed city: The politics of water, housing, and land use in  drought-parched São Paulo. Public Culture, 28(2 (79)), 261-289.  

• Datta, A. (2019). Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India's smart urban age. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(3), 393-410.  

• Danyluk, M. (2021). Supply-Chain Urbanism: Constructing and Contesting the Logistics City. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-16.  

• Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. Verso.  

• Furlong, K., & Kooy, M. (2017). Worlding water supply: Thinking beyond the network in  Jakarta. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(6), 888-903.  

• Guma, P. K. (2021). Recasting Provisional Urban Worlds in the Global South: Shacks, Shanties and Micro-Stalls. Planning Theory & Practice, 1-16.  

• Knuth, S. (2019). Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting.  Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51(2), 487-504.  

•Lancione, M., & McFarlane, C. (Eds.). (2021). Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City. Routledge.

•Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual review of anthropology, 42, 327-343.

•Lemanski, C. (2020). Infrastructural citizenship: The everyday citizenships of adapting and/or destroying public infrastructure in Cape Town, South Africa. Transactions of the Institute of British geographers, 45(3), 589-605.

•Long, J., & Rice, J. L. (2019). From sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism. Urban Studies,56(5), 992-1008.

•Robinson, J. (2002). Global and world cities: a view from off the map. International journal of urban and regional research, 26(3), 531-554.

•Simone, A., & Pieterse, E. (2018). New urban worlds: Inhabiting dissonant times. John Wiley & Sons