Prof Richard Burdett 8.01J

This course is compulsory on the Executive MSc in Cities. This course is not available as an outside option.

This course is only available to students registered in the Executive MSc in Cities.

Cities and Society: Design and Social Cohesion looks at some of the major drivers of urban inequality and poverty and the key actions that cities are taking to reduce urban inequalities through urban design, infrastructure and policy. This is a heavily applied course providing students with tools to analyse the socio-demographic profile of households and neighbourhoods and their relation to spatial distribution and clustering in cities of the developing and developed world. Students are introduced to traditional measures of poverty and inequality such as income and wealth as well more recent multi-dimensional poverty measures such as health and education, and provided with analytical and mapping tools to identify areas of concentration of deprivation. A particular emphasis is placed on identifying spatial strategies that can alleviate the concentration of urban poverty and inequality by optimising access to jobs, housing, education, health, public space, transport and community infrastructure.

Cities and Society will also look at the macro-economic forces that are producing uneven regional and urban development and the key planning methods to reduce levels of inequality. These include spatially blind policies such as taxation and redistribution; spatially connective policies such as infrastructure links between high and low income neighbourhoods and finally spatially targeted policies where private and public investment is targeted at the most deprived urban areas.

Topics include: inequality and GINI coefficients; from income to multi-dimensional measures of poverty; the Human Development Index and its urban relevance; affordable housing, social infrastructure; equity planning (examples include London, Barcelona, Medellin and Bogota; the London model of urban regeneration; infrastructure and equity, health and well-being, migration.

4 hours and 30 minutes of lectures, 3 hours of seminars and 1 hour and 30 minutes of workshops in the MT. 10 hours and 30 minutes of lectures, 6 hours of seminars and 3 hours of workshops in the LT.

The course will be taught over a period of three sessions.

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

500 word submission identifying the social research methods used in the assessment of a policy or project of your choice

Burdett, R and Sudjic, D (2011) Living in the Endless City.

Dávila, Julio (2012): Urban Mobility and Poverty: Lessons from Medellin and Soacha, Colombia. Development Planning Unit, UCL and Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Davis, Mike (2007): Planet of Slums. Verso.

Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (2001) Splintering Urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition London: Routledge.

Healey, Patsy (1997): Collaborative planning: shaping places in fragmented societies. UBC Press.

Hills, J & Stewart, K. A more equal society? 2004.

Krumholz, N. and P. Clavel (1994): Reinventing Cities: Equity Planners Tell Their Stories. Temple University Press.

Krumholz, N. (1982): A Retrospective View of Equity Planning Cleveland 1969-1979.

Larice, M. and Macdonald, E. (eds) (2007) The Urban Design Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

Massey, D.S. and N.A. Denton (1993): American apartheid: segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press.

Additional readings:

Burdett,R and Sudjic, D (2008) The Endless City, London, Phaidon.

Mitlin, Diana and David Satterthwaite (2013): Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature. Routledge.

Power, Anne (1987): Property before people: the management of twentieth-century council housing. Allen & Unwin.

Saunders, Doug (2012): Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World. Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Incorporated.

Sennett, R (1991) The Conscience of the Eye: the design and social life of cities, London, Faber and Faber.

Essay (70%, 2000 words) and presentation (30%) in the MT.

Design and present a research method to assess a project or policy of your choice (30%) and submission of an essay looking critically at the social research methods used in the assessment of an existing policy or project (70%).