Credit Points 10

Legacy Code 100291

Coordinator Sherene Idriss Opens in new window

Description What makes a city a city? Who says? From Sydney to Dubai, New York to Tokyo, this subject explores the social, cultural, political and economic aspects that inform the making of modern urban cities. We look at how gender, race, ethnicity and social class factor into modern urban planning. Students will be tasked with examining how these environments shape our relationships to each other, the environment and to understanding ourselves. Urban life can be frantic, difficult, polluted and often dangerous. Yet cities are also cultural melting pots exposing us to diversity, revolutions and new subcultural scenes. At the same time, they contain harsh living conditions as sites of, for example, colonisation, refugee camps and homelessness. Students will explore a range of texts – from film and media representations, news articles to scholarly theory and statistical data – to gain a deeper understanding about the complexities of modern cities. We will use sociological methods to think creatively about the kinds of future cities we would want to live.

School Humanities & Comm Arts

Discipline Human Geography

Student Contribution Band HECS Band 4 10cp

Check your fees via the Fees page.

Level Undergraduate Level 2 subject

Restrictions

Successful completion of 40 credit points of study in currently enrolled program.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. describe the processes by which early industrial cities were formed;
2. evaluate the public and political responses to social tensions and inequalities in these cities;
3. analyse the forces that promote urban redevelopment and associated social and political reform;
4. evaluate the motivations behind, and consequences of, urban ethnographic writing and reportage in late nineteenth century Britain and Australia;
5. explain how and why suburbanised low density cities (particularly Sydney) emerged in the period after World War II; and
6. assess how social identities are influenced by urban forms - size, density, zoning practices, division of labour.

Subject Content

• Youth, Subcultural Scenes and Moral Panics in modern cities
• Multiculturalism, Migration in urban life
• Divisions of labour in urban planning
• Global Inequalities between Global North/Global South
• Economic Development and Gentrification in modern urban life
• Social Revolutions and Cultural Change