Module description
For the past 50 years, there has been a global and persistent shift towards urbanisation. The majority of this growth has been concentrated in the Global South, where 52% of the population currently live in urban areas, a figure expected to reach 66% by 2050 (UN-Habitat 2023). Urbanisation is a deeply transformative process. Cities serve as hubs of social, cultural and economic dynamicity and generally offer their residents better living standards than rural areas. However, urbanisation is also a deeply uneven process that both produces and reproduces various forms of intersectional inequalities, including access to housing, public infrastructures and services, and in the labour market. City residents also navigate crime and violence, differentiated access to citizenship rights, and often high levels of poverty. These issues are also compounded by global phenomena, including the effects of increased mobilities, pandemics and, most notably, climate change. Urbanisation brings promises and exacerbate challenges for people across the Global South, requiring nuanced approaches from development theory and practice to understand and tackle its multifaceted character.
In this module, we discuss contemporary theoretical approaches and themes at the nexus of development, cities and urbanisation. The first part of the module will delve into theoretical approaches to the urban in the Global South. We explore debates that present these cities in terms of their supposed characteristic 'underdevelopment', as well as perspectives that center urban peripheries as grounds for urban theory from and for the Global South. In doing so, we anchor urban development in the long history of colonialism and in more recent structural adjustment programmes that shape cities from above, as well as in the forms of popular resistance and urbanisation that contest power from below.
The examination of how competing views of development inform our understanding of processes of urbanisation, lays the ground for the second part of the module in which we examine key themes such as infrastructures, violence and securitisation, mobility and migration, informal labour markets, climate adaptation, and popular forms of contestation. Focusing on empirical studies from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, we analyse the complex dynamics producing and transforming cities across the Global South, attuned to ways in which these shape and are affected by intersecting hierarchies of class, race, gender and origins. In this part of the module, seminars are designed to invite students actively to participate in the analysis through group presentations and collective discussion, examination and feedback. The goal is collaboratively to devise tools to (re)think cities across the globe. We close the module by reflecting on and imagining the future of cities.
Assessment details
- Group Presentation & Coursework
Educational aims & objectives
The educational aims of this module are:
- To equip students with strong theoretical, empirical and conceptual foundations to study and understand the role of cities and urbanisation in processes of development.
- To advance students' ability to critically employ and assess development theories regarding the formulation of urban policies across the Global South.
- To encourage and enable students to think critically about the power hierarchies and intersectional inequalities that shape urbanisation and are transformed by this process in developing and emerging economies.
- To introduce students to the main political, economic and social ideas and to the key actors and institutions that currently lead urban development through top-down and bottom-up processes.
- To expose students to cutting-edge debates on core issues surrounding the nexus of development and urbanisation in the Global South, such as: infrastructures, violence and securitisation, mobility and migration, informal labour markets, climate change, and popular insurgence in urban contexts.
- To promote students' research and analytical skills to engage with key contemporary challenges and opportunities facing cities in the Global South and their growing population.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module students will be able to:
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of current theoretical debates on the nexus between development, cities and urbanisation.
- Critically reflect on the reproduction and transformation of power dynamics and inequalities along historical and contemporary processes of urbanisation.
- Explore and compare urban experiences, practices, and process across diverse developing contexts. Critically assess challenges facing cities and urban populations in developing contexts.
- Contrast the perspectives, aspirations and critiques offered by social movements, policy makers and third-sector actors for cities in developing contexts.
Teaching pattern
One weekly lecture and one weekly seminar.