Module GEOG42215: Global Urban Life

Department: Geography

GEOG42215: Global Urban Life

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• Equip students with an advanced understanding of contemporary global urban transformations.
• Analyse the interconnections between urban processes and different everyday practices and lives through a range of global case study cities.
• Provide frameworks for understanding how cities and urban life are changing amid a range of crises and challenges.

Content

• The urban world is transforming, as once peripheral places become urban. At the same time, cities are being reshaped by a poly-crisis of upheavals, such as the climate crisis, technological transformation, new patterns of work and living, intensifying inequalities and vulnerabilities, global migration, war and conflict, and spatial transformations.
• Amidst these and other intersecting contemporary crises, the module explores how urban life is changing and critically considers what role cities play in responding to such crises. We will explore the global processes changing cities and ask how urban residents’ dwell within, adapt to, and remake urban life, composing innovative solutions as they do so.
• As such, the module addresses a vital question for the future of cities: how can human and non-human life in the city survive and thrive? What might the ‘good city’ be in times of upheaval and crisis and as more of the world becomes urban?
• The module will address these questions through three thematic domains, explored through a range of global case study cities, with reference to various urbanisms emerging and/or transforming in both the majority world and the “northern” contexts. Indicative content might include:
• 1: Infrastructural Life. How is urban life shaped, enabled, suppressed, or damaged by both material and social infrastructure, from sanitation, water, energy, transport, and digital systems to social norms, informal support systems, or improvised community organisations?
• 2: Home Life. How does ‘home’, from the house to the neighbourhood and wider city or different ecological niches, shape understanding and experience of urban life in a time of increasingly sprawling urbanisms, and multiple movements and displacements?
• 3: Political Life. How are changing forms of political organisation and arrangement impacting urban residents’ experiences of urban life, and how are the latter responding to these political institutions and arrangements collectively?

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the intersections between distinct urban processes and urban residents’ everyday practices and lives.
• Have knowledge of the key tendencies and trajectories transforming cities amid a range of contemporary crises and challenges.
• Have advanced knowledge of case study cities and the range of ways urban change is lived with and adapted to.

• Critically engage in debates about the processes, mechanisms and characters of contemporary global urbanisms.
• Ability to make diagnosis of the connections between different urban processes and specific everyday practices.  
• Capacity to assess the possibilities and limits of various ways of responding to and living amid urban change.

• Critical thinking and problem solving 
• Ability to make theoretical diagnosis of empirical cases, including the skills of making comparisons where appropriate.
• Written and other communication

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Lectures will introduce core concepts, focusing in on the relations between global processes transforming cities and specific everyday practices and lives. Each lecture will be paired with an hour-long seminar, in which students will engage in more-depth with specific case studies of the global processes through a range of learning activities, including mini-presentations, debates, and mapping exercises.
• The seminars will build towards the ‘Global Urban Life Report’ which will focus on a theoretically informed analysis of selected case study cities focusing in on a selected module theme.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Provided via focused activities across seminars building towards the summative, including in-seminar comments on draft report plan and a presentation of plan.

■ Students who do not attend monitored activities shown under Teaching Methods and Learning Hours, or who fail to complete the summative or formative assessment(s) specified above, may be subject to the Academic Progress procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University.