Dr Austin Zeiderman

This course is available on the MSc Human Geography and Urban Studies (Research), MSc in City Design and Social Science, MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Local Economic Development, MSc in Regional And Urban Planning Studies, MSc in Urban Policy (LSE and Sciences Po) and MSc in Urbanisation and Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

By now we are accustomed to hearing that, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. We may also be aware that more than one billion people now live in the urban slums and shantytowns of the global South, and that this is where the majority of world population growth will take place. But what sort of futures are being imagined for the cities of the twenty-first century? This course will critically analyse how the future of cities, and the cities of the future, are being thought about and acted upon in the present. Students will learn to adopt a geographical and historical approach to urban futurity by exploring how ways of envisioning the future of cities differ across time and space. Treating the future as a social, cultural, and political reality with a profound influence on the present, the course will examine how urban areas are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in anticipation of the city yet to come. Each class will be organised around a particular model for the future of the city: for example, the utopian city, the colonial city, the industrial city, the socialist city, the natural city, the modernist city, and the apocalyptic city. Each model will be examined through concrete examples and will enable the discussion of broader theoretical perspectives in urban studies, with a specific focus on their approach to the analysis of urban futures. Though grounded in urban geography, this course will draw upon texts and other materials from anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, literature, film, philosophy, social theory, architecture, art, and city planning. Its primary objective is to equip students with sophisticated ways of thinking about the future of cities, since doing so has real significance for the kind of city we want to, and eventually will, ourselves inhabit.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

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

One 1,500-2,000 formative essay in weeks 4-5 of the term (response to readings)

The formative essay will be an opportunity for students to produce a response paper to the readings for a particular week, and to receive feedback on their analytical and writing skills. The response paper should not summarise the readings, but rather respond to or comment on them and pose questions.

A detailed syllabus will be provided at the beginning of the course, but will include works such as:

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (2000);

Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity (1998);

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973);

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006);

Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (2002);

Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1961);

Thomas More, Utopia (1989 [1516]);

Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (2010);

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001);

Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (1991);

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845);

Walter Benjamin, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1986);

Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”  (1969);

Ebenezer Howard, “The Town-Country Magnet” (2003);

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in the ST.

The assessed essay will be a critical exercise in the analysis of urban futurity. Students will be given a choice: 1) Identify and research one vision of urban futurity that exists in the present. 2) Take a particular city and research the ways its future has been figured in the past, and how it is currently being figured in the present. Final essays must contain approximately 5,000 words of text although students may also include images, as well as any other media that pertains to their argument.