Course Description
An advanced urban geographic course that focuses on the interconnected and intersecting politics of nature in the city. This course analyzes how urban geographic process help produce, and are in turn co-produced, through urban environmental processes. Special attention will be given to processes of spatial uneven development.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be assigned one extra reading per class
and be expected to engage the reading, as well as class
discussion, in a more informed and critical manner than
undergraduate students. Additionally, graduate students will be
assigned an extra writing requirement (extra 40% length added to
their final research paper). Overall, it is expected that
graduate students will help foster more thoughtful discussion
in class but not at the expense of allowing ample time for
undergraduate students to contribute to class discussion.
Athena Title
Urban Political Ecology
Undergraduate Pre or Corequisite
GEOG 3630 or GEOG 3630E or permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
The objectives of this course are for students to gain understanding of the history of nature in the city through the lens of urban political ecology. The course will include particular attention to the challenges that the uneven development of urban nature and environmental justice pose to urban residents. The objectives and expected learning outcomes of this course are that students: • gain familiarity with the intricacies of urban political ecological dynamics, the history of nature in the city, and the challenges that the uneven development of urban nature and environmental justice pose to urban residents; • come to understand how urban environments (both natural and built ones) are always changing---being created, transformed, and maintained through a complex set of economic, political, cultural, and ecological processes; • come to understand how the social processes that contribute to transformation of environmental landscapes requires critical engagement with urban histories to unearth the ways in which urban environments, both holistically and along particular dimensions (land, water, air, etc.), have changed in the recent decades; • learn how political economy and other social processes produce and reproduce urban environments that often tend to favor the elite at the expense of marginalized individuals; • gain the ability to find, assess the reliability of, and interpret urban environmental information using a variety of print and online sources.
Topical Outline
-Introduction to urban environments -Social production of nature -Processes of urban metabolism and circulation -Urban political ecology -Environmental justice -Green gentrification in the city -Urban geography of ecological externalities -Climate justice in the 21st Century