This is a dedicated platform for students on the two PhD programmes housed within the Urbanisation, Planning and Development (UPD) research cluster: PhD Human Geography and Urban Studies (HGUS) and PhD Regional and Urban Planning Studies (RUPS). It is meant primarily as a space for communicating between and among the UPD cluster's PhD community about matters of common interest. Anyone can post a comment, question, announcement, or notification of any kind and anyone is free to respond. Please note that discussions will not be monitored or moderated. Proposals for other possible uses for this Moodle page are welcome and should be brought to the attention of Programme Directors, Dr Austin Zeiderman (HGUS) and Dr Nancy Holman (RUPS), or the Doctoral Programme Administrator, Pete Mills (p.b.mills@lse.ac.uk). Except for the "Announcements" forum, to which everyone is subscribed, the other forums are optional and users can choose to unsubscribe from them at any time.
Photo: Professor Sylvia Chant, "Walk on by"
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This
course is aimed at understanding the micro foundations of local economic development,
that is the determinants and effects of the behaviour, strategies and choices
of the key economic actors: local firms, both small and large, multinational
enterprises, universities and other education and research organisations, government
bodies, NGOs, and local communities. The study of theoretical approaches,
empirical evidence and implications of the behaviour of such actors, and their
interactions and linkages, will help building up the analytical framework to interpret
the genesis of localised economic systems, their dynamics and evolution over
time and the policy options, particularly, but not exclusively, from a
bottom-up perspective. We will make use of an extended array of empirical
examples and case studies across regions and industries, both in advanced and
emerging economies, and consider the transferability of
lessons and insights over space and time.
The course is particularly concerned with place-sensitive approaches and focuses on locally initiated and managed processes which may involve a wide range of actors in shaping and implementing local economic development initiatives.
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About the course
On this course you will think through what makes London such a specific
kind of urban scene, and how have people sought to represent its
specificity? Rather than a comprehensive account of London’s past and
present, this course uses the synthetic (social, economic, political and
cultural) tools of human geography to understand how and why London is a specific kind of urban scene. Topics
include, but are not limited to; empire, landscape, spectacle, the body
& sexuality and migration & racism. An important 'lab' component
involves leaving the classroom to enter the LSE Archives and to walk
the streets to interpret London's cultural geographies. You are
encouraged to go on walks, to explore aspects of the city you do not
already know, and to dig through archival material to find connections
between past and present London.
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About the course
This course explores the complex relationships between economic development, poverty and the environment. It covers a range of important natural resource and environmental issues in developing countries, and provides students with the necessary tools to critically evaluate how these issues have been addressed by different stakeholders and at different levels of governance. Using concepts and analytical tools grounded in applied economics, primarily environmental and development economics, the course will examine a range of topics, including: the poverty-environment trap; property rights and governance; the food-energy-environment nexus; and, urban environment and development.- Teacher:
About the course
This course explores the complex relationships between development, poverty and the environment. It covers a range of important natural resource and environmental issues, and provides students with the necessary tools to critically evaluate how these issues have been addressed by different stakeholders and at different levels of governance. Using concepts and analytical tools grounded in political ecology and critical development studies, the course examines several topics, including: the politics of sustainable development; environmental governance and tenure; and critical resource issues.- Teacher:
About the course
This course examines the issues, actors and processes that shape environmental governance at the transnational and global scales. Introductory lectures on the global environmental policy process introduce different scholarly perspectives informing recent and current research: these approaches are referred to as subsequent lectures address particular actor groups, processes and issues. Students are encouraged to think critically about the ways in which the regulation of global environmental risk is framed and politically negotiated.- Teacher:
About the course
This course seeks to explore and critically interrogate the governance of environmental sustainability by corporate and financial actors - commonly framed in terms of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable and responsible investment (SRI), respectively. Drawing on a range of theoretical ideas, the emphasis of the course is on providing students with an understanding of the motives, practices and outcomes of market actors’ growing involvement in sustainability. Topics covered include strategic CSR, corporate self-regulation, governing through environmental ratings, international climate finance, green bonds, greenwashing and the relationship between financial and environmental performance.
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This course will critically analyze the intimate relationship between race and geography in the modern world. Through a range of historical and contemporary cases, it will examine how interconnected forms of racial and spatial difference are produced, reproduced, and transformed. Focusing on the material and cultural formation of racialized geographies, students will learn to recognize how racially inflected discourses and practices shape the production of space and how geographical location matters to racial classification, identification, and discrimination. The course will be organized around a series of archetypal spaces: for example, the body, the nation, the colony, the city, the home, the prison, the plantation, the border, the school, or the street. In each case, students will examine the confluence of race and space within broader themes, such as colonialism, capitalism, urbanization, globalization, environmentalism, migration, and incarceration. Since race often intersects with other forms of difference, students will also learn to interrogate the influence of gender, class, religion, and sexuality on the production of space. Texts from human geography, critical race theory, colonial and postcolonial studies, history, sociology, and anthropology in addition to other media, such as film, literature, journalism, and photography, will provide students with conceptual resources and methodological tools. The ultimate objective is to advance a comparative, critical analysis of the relationship between geography and race, past and present, and to explore the conditions of future possibility for the linked political projects of anti-racism and spatial justice.
Image (left): Rosa Parks riding the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Source: Daily Advertiser/AP.
- Teacher:
About the course
The main aim of this course is to analyse how decisions made by individuals influence the distribution of economic activities across space. The lectures will focus on how people sort across areas; on how they express their demand and preferences for specific locations and spatial attributes; and on how individual decisions carry important implications for the urban/regional economies and their labour markets. The emphasis will be on quantitative aspects and the lectures will cover both economic theories and related empirical methodology/applications. The course will be split into two interrelated blocks. One will concentrate on residential markets and study decisions made by individuals in relation to tenure choice and demand for housing space. Some time will be devoted to analysing how these processes affect the neighbourhoods where individuals live in terms of social stratification, externalities and crime. The other part of the course will analyse the dynamics of local labour markets, geographical mobility, national and international migration and their effects on the local economy.
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About the course
This course aims to develop theoretical and empirical understanding of spatial economic processes in order to study and evaluate a wide range of issues and policies. Particular emphasis will be put on regional economies, business and worker location decisions, focusing in particular on models of the location of economic and innovation activity with a particular emphasis on regional economies. We will analyse the New Economic Geography theories and the agglomeration of economic activity, with a particular focus on EU integration as a testing ground. We will also look at the global and local knowledge economy, focusing on core aspects of a society based on knowledge and technical progress and how this proceeds hand in hand with the enlargement of markets and the intensification of exchange. We will also explore the seeming contradiction that geographically localized knowledge may be increasingly significant just as so much of our world becomes more globalized.
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About the course
This course introduces students to the geography of gender inequalities and their variations at regional, national and local levels in the high income countries and emerging economies. It focuses on the variability of gender roles and relations and their socio-spatial implications in different geographical contexts.
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About the course
This course introduces students to the geography of gender inequalities and their variations at regional, national and local levels in the Global South. Particular attention is paid to the still-lagging but vital ’en-gendering’ of development analysis and policy over time, and how gender is critical in understanding people’s experiences of social, economic, demographic and political aspects of development as individuals, and in the context of households, communities and nation-states. Topics covered include the evolution of gender on ‘development agendas’ and the changing nature of gender framing and ‘women’s empowerment’ in development policy and practice, the measurement of gender inequalities, domestic divisions of labour and household transformations, gendered employment, gendered dynamics of migration within and from the Global South, and gender in relation to reproductive health and health and healthcare in general.
Dr. Mara Nogueira
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About the course
This course covers theories and processes of contemporary urban development from a critical political economy perspective, addressing urban problems and policy responses in our rapidly urbanizing world. The course examines what urbanisation means to the state, to (global/domestic) businesses, and ordinary citizens, focusing on a selected set of key themes that are pertinent to the understanding of urban injustice. Such themes include, but not limited to, the understanding of the (social) production of unequal urban space, global circulations of urbanism, gentrification, displacement and dispossession. Case studies are largely drawn from cities in the majority world, especially East and Southeast Asia, which provide opportunities for students to contest urban theories that have largely been rooted in the experiences of the advanced economies.
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About the course
This course covers theories and processes of contemporary urban development from a variety of perspectives – it aims to introduce students to key concepts in, and approaches to, politics in cities, as these have emerged and developed over time. Themes include, but are not limited to, political and economic power in cites, the role of ‘elites’, urban government finance, the politics of local economic development policy, the multidimensional role of culture in urban change, and the emergence of forms of urban governance. Case studies are largely drawn from cities in the United States and the United Kingdom, reflecting the development of core ideas in mainstream urban politics largely in these contexts.
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About the course
A critical analysis of the politics of contemporary development
processes in the South and the global interests that influence them. The
course considers development as both practical pursuit and as a series
of discourses and representations. Three key themes are covered: Key concepts and historical overview; securing development in the 21st century; and doing development in the 21st century.
- Teacher:
About the course
The course will introduce students to the framework and tools used by economists to study the processes of growth and development, and analyse its determinants. After a short discussion of the basic modelling framework, the course will focus on empirical aspects. First, it will discuss the drawbacks and failures of simple models in which technological change fully determines the rate of growth of a country or region. Then it will present a set of enriching ingredients, which will allow for a better understanding of why different countries and regions around the world are characterised by different stages of development. The presentation of the material will be structured around four main blocks: Human Capital, Education and Growth; the Information Technology Revolution; Trade and Globalization; and the New Institutional Paradigm. The course will close with a discussion of how the original framework worked out by economists back in ‘60s, coupled with new insights, provides a flexible tool to derive policy implications for growth and development.
- Teacher:
About the course
The course aims to prepare second-year students to undertake individual research projects. It examines the methodologies used in field-based geographical and environmental research and evaluates their application to different kinds of research problems. It considers the choice of methodology which may be used in the student’s own Independent Research Project (IRP) and how to plan research. It enables students to acquire familiarity with, and practice of, contemporary qualitative research techniques and to examine different ways of, and gain experience in, presenting research results. A further aim of the course is to enable students to evaluate critically the methodological validity of geographical literature.- Teacher:
About the course
The course aims to prepare second-year students to undertake individual
research projects. It examines the methodologies used in field-based
geographical research and evaluates their application to different kinds
of research problems. It considers the choice of methodology which may
be used in the student’s own Independent Research Project (IRP) and how
to plan research. It enables students to acquire familiarity with, and
practice of, contemporary qualitative research techniques and to examine
different ways of, and gain experience in, presenting research results.
A further aim of the course is to enable students to evaluate
critically the methodological validity of geographical literature.
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