GEOG241: The Urban Experience

Daniel Iwama

Cities are places of hope and despair. Today over half of the world’s population lives in cities; by 2050, the United Nations expects that statistic to approximate seventy percent. Rapid urbanization around the world has caused drastic climatic, economic, and social transformations, often manifesting in uneven outcomes. In this undergraduate course, we will explore the “urban experience” through the salient themes of: housing/homelessness, planning, gentrification, warfare and cities, the suburb, and Indigenous experiences of urbanization.

Through targeted readings, regular discussion and a major assignment, our investigation of the topics above will be especially attuned to aspects of history, power, and social inequality. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to identify pertinent themes in contemporary urban-geography research, enabling them to participate in relevant discourses and debates. Students will also refine their ability to critically analyze social problems and form sound arguments in written and oral form. 

Module 1: Approaching the City

Ways of knowing the city; Urbanization as process; Experiential aspects of place; Everyday life, Spatial inequality; Uneven development

Module 2: Indigenous Continuities

Settler colonialism; "Urbs-Nullius"; Indigenous resurgence; Relational place-making, Urban Indigeneity; Contested sovereignties

Module 3: Planning and Urban Governance 

Planning as control; Linking knowledge to action; Technocratic rationality; Spatial regulation; Zoning; Financing growth; Institutional power

Module 4: Places to Live

Property regimes; Housing in/security in BC; "Homelessness and the issue of freedom"; Stigma and the city; Structural inequality; Public policy approaches

Module 5: Gentrification 

Revanchist city, Accumulation by dispossession; Causal theories of Gentrification; Ethnic enclaves; Heritage; The "neighbourhood"

Module 6: Cities Under Siege 

Geopolitics and the city; Urban conflict; Divided cities; Fear and surveillance; Spatial fragmentation; Cold-war geographies

Module 7: The Suburb Reconsidered

Urbanization on the margins; Racialized peripheries; Infrastructure and inequality; Shifting boundaries; Regional governance