The core aims of the module are to develop student skills to build an understanding of an unfamiliar urban context through a critical engagement with existing urban theory and an openness to developing insights based on scholarship drawn from specific urban contexts and regions. Students will have the opportunity to acquire detailed knowledge of and insight into urbanisation and urban experiences of a selection of urban contexts in different regions and will explore the potential for the decolonisation of urban knowledge. The course will involve active engagement with the history and urban challenges of one or more partner cities (for example, Johannesburg), as well as selected other cases. Elements of the course will be delivered collaboratively with partner city staff and students. Themes will be drawn from dominant themes identified in the existing scholarship on the partner cities (such as exclusion, inequality, land, city-regions, extended urbanisation, migration, large-scale urban developments, policy learning, cultural politics and urban design and planning histories), as well as from contemporary policy challenges, urban political issues, artistic practice and design and planning innovations. A wide variety of sources will be assembled and interrogated to build insights into the selected cities through workshops and studio activities, including academic and policy sources, empirical studies, data analysis, maps, and visual sources. The course will support and feed directly into the immersive experience or field-trip-based module, 'City Co-lab'.Course Coordinators: Jennifer Robinson, Njogu Morgan, Clare Melhuish, and Nishat Awan.Post-Graduate Teaching Assistant
Cities Studio (MASc. Global Urbanism)
Histories of Global London | 1900 - Present (MASc. Global Urbanism)
This module focuses on understanding how London’s built environment has been
shaped by its global connections and associated population flows from 1900 to the present.
It considers the changing framework of urban governance, architectural and community
development at a number of definitive moments, such as the publication of the County of London
Plan (1943), the dissolution of the Greater London Council in 1986, the establishment of the
Greater London Authority and Mayor of London in 2000, and approaches to diversity and the
public realm under the current mayor, Sadiq Khan. The module draws on a multiplicity of sources
to analyse urban regeneration and gentrification. It looks at the formation of places and
buildings through a focus on the influence of minoritised communities, cultural practices and
intangible heritage. It positions the city’s global colonial histories and its social diversity as
central to a critical understanding of its urban and architectural heritage and future. The module
asks students to engage critically with questions such as: how do we assess urban and
architectural heritage as a social, cultural and economic asset for urban development in complex
multicultural and/or postcolonial cities (UNESCO 2011)? How are heritage and culture implicated
in contested urban and architectural redevelopment? Participants engage with key debates in the
history and theory of urban change in relation to histories of urban social movements, and
theories of global cities, social diversity, and critical heritage. This module pursues UCL Urban
Laboratory’s transdisciplinary and multi-media approaches, with a specific emphasis on
ethnographic, oral, visual and archival methods and sources.Course Coordinators: Ben Campkin, Clare Melhuish, and Lo Marshall.