Dr Ryan Centner

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 Environment and Development, MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and USC), MSc in Regional And Urban Planning Studies, MSc in Social Policy and Development, 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.

This course uses the concept of 'urban revolution' as an organising principle to introduce students to key theories and debates related to societies undergoing rapid urban change. Course lectures examine 'urban revolution' in three senses. The first pertains to Henri Lefebvre's use of the term to signify the 'complete urbanisation of society', a historical process by which social life, even outside of cities, becomes urbanised. This means addressing the relationship between the country and the city, the idea of the urban in historical perspective, and the relationship between urban life in the global North and South. The second treatment of 'urban revolution' considers the city as a site for radical political change and social experimentation. This means studying cities as spaces of movement, resistance, and innovation, with an emphasis on urban experiments in the South. Thirdly, urban revolution is analysed in terms of the explosion of policies aimed at managing the place and function of cities in the global economy. Through these three lenses - theory, politics and policy - the course aims to equip students with a conceptual and empirical foundation for analysing globalised urbanisation, with particular attention to emerging urbanisms in the South.

Topics covered may include the following: the right to the city; urban uprisings; the colonial and postcolonial city; processes of suburbanisation, ghettoisation, and gentrification; the politics of infrastructure and displacement; urban informality; urban violence.

20 hours of lectures in the MT. 2 hours of lectures in the ST.

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

H. Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, 1996;

M. Castells, The City and the Grassroots, 1984;

M. Davis, Planet of Slums, 2006;

D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, 2012;

A. Merrifield, The New Urban Question, 2014;

T. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo, 2000;

J. Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, 2006;

A. Roy and A. Ong, Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, 2011;

A. Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads, 2010;

N. Brenner, Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, 2013.

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