SSC 199H1S
Section L0231
Course Timetable

Cities and Everyday Life

Over fifty percent of the world’s inhabitants now live in cities. In Canada, eighty percent of Canadians live in cities with populations of 500,000 or more, and the proportion of urban dwellers continues to grow. Understanding the nature of everyday living within cities is therefore increasingly important. This course examines the links between social, political and economic transformation and the continual building and rebuilding of urban landscapes at a variety of scales. A key focus will be on urban lives and livelihoods, and on the way lives differ by class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Both theories and methods that help us understand urban life will be explored. The course will include one or more of the following sub-topics: (1) urban health and marginalization, (2) housing and homelessness, (3) urban governance and institutions, (4) social justice movements in the city, (5) processes of economic and geographic restructuring and their impacts on work, employment and well-being, (6) urban cultures, identities and diversity, (7) crime, violence and security, (8) mobility, access and transportation, (9) built environments, public space, and civil society.

Professor R. DiFrancesco, Department of Geography

SSC 199H1S
Section L0232
Course Timetable

Political Spaces

Is space political? In what ways? What are the implications of thinking about politics geographically? How do political conflicts both invoke and transform space and place? What kinds of alternative political relationships to space and alternative mappings can we imagine? This course will attempt to answer those questions while exploring a wide range of possible contexts in which political spaces are evident. These may include: conflicts over the intimate spaces of the body, identity, and the home; the racialization and gendering of space; the politics of cities and urbanization; the boundaries of public and private space; struggles over land, property, resources and "nature"; the political geographies of labour, citizenship and migration; globalization of economic markets and alternative economic political and social cartographies; borders, geopolitics, and the territorial politics of empire; and the geographic projects of colonialism, post-coloniality, modernity, and modernization.

Professor J. Hackworth, Department of Geography