onlincourse

Global Urban Theory Lab: Extended and Displaced Urbanisation

Dive into urban studies and extended urbanisation in this insightful course from UCL. Explore urban growth, governance, and displacement with a focus on the African context.

Duration

4 weeks

Weekly study

3 hours

100% online

How it works

Unlimited subscription

Learn more

Explore global urbanisation, learning from African contexts

This course provides an opportunity to learn about and build insights from one of Africa’s most dynamic urban regions, the Gauteng City-region, comprising more than 15 million people. South Africa provides an excellent opportunity to contribute to theory-building about the processes of displaced and extended urbanisation.

Build your understanding of new urbanisation processes

Extended and displaced urbanisation leads to sprawling and fragmented urban regions, as well as new urban settlements emerging in remote regions around the world, often in response to extractive economic activities and infrastructure corridors. South Africa provides an excellent context for exploring these trends - apartheid-era legislation created urban settlements far from jobs and city centres; some are now arguably dynamic centres of autonomous urbanism, but still closely connected to metropolitan regions like Gauteng.

Develop your own insights and contribute to urban theory-building

Explore the case of Johannesburg through bespoke videos, expert interviews and guided reading of academic and policy texts, and draw on your own knowledge and experience of other contexts, to interpret processes of extended and displaced urbanisation. Join in a directed process of developing your own conceptualisations of these new aspects of global urbanisation.

Address governance challenges of displaced urbanisation

Confront the governance hurdles of managing extended urban regions and displaced urbanisation. Explore emergent governance models and planning challenges of displaced and extended urbanisation in the Gauteng region, reflecting on strategies for services and infrastructure management in rapidly expanding urban landscapes.

Week 1
What and Where is Urban?
- Welcome
  Welcome to the first week of your collaborative online course
- Course tools
  In this Activity, we want to familiarize you with some tools we'll be using in this course: the Discussion Forum and Padlet.
- Vocabularies of Urban Territories
  We will be taking a look at a short reading, and start to engage with some of the key debates and concepts we will be exploring in this course. You will also consider how to approach complex academic texts.
- Learning from Africa: the case of Johannesburg
  In this Activity, we introduce the city of Johannesburg, and consider some of the key themes which we will be exploring in more detail in the next few weeks.
- Enrichment Activities and Further Reading
  If you have more time, you might like to explore the following enrichment activities.
Week 2
Urban territories: Stretching, shrinking, displaced Johannesburg
- Welcome to week 2
  A short introduction to week 2
- Apartheid urban territories
  In this Activity, we explore the continuing implications of apartheid in Johannesburg.
- Post-apartheid urban territories
  In this Activity, we look at the transformation of the Gauteng city-region since the end of apartheid.
- Displaced urbanisation
  In this Activity, we explore the idea of ‘displaced urbanisation’ as a kind of urban form.
- Displaced urbanisation in other settings
  In this Activity, we consider whether displaced urbanisation/urbanism can be seen in other cities.
- Enrichment Activities and Further Reading
  Explore these additional readings if you have time.
Week 3
Conceptualising urbanisation processes
- Welcome to week 3
  An introduction to week 3.
- Migration shaping urban territories in Johannesburg
  In this Activity, we explore how Gauteng has been shaped by different kinds of migration.
- Explore an urban territory shaped by mobility: “enclave entrepôt”
  In this Activity, we will look at the idea of the “enclave entrepôt”.
- Building Urban Concepts: What is an Urbanisation Process?
  In this Activity, we build on the reading we’ve done so far to develop our own urban concepts.
- Enrichment Activities and Further Reading
  Explore these further readings if you have time.
Week 4
Governing Extended Urbanisation
- Welcome to week 4
  Professor Jennifer Robinson introduces the final week of this course.
- Governing extended urbanisation: Collaboration or Competition in the extended urban region?
  In this Activity, we explore possible ways of governing the extended city region.
- Governing Displaced Urbanisation
  In this Activity, we consider how ideas of displaced urbanisation and displaced urbanism might inform governance strategies
- Governing the entrepôt enclave
  In this Activity, we explore the idea of urban governance and relate it to the work we have already done on the “entrepôt enclave”.
- Enrichment Activities and Further Reading
  Explore some further readings which develop the ideas we’ve discussed this week.