The just city: current trends in urban development
The course reviews current trends in urban development through questions of social justice. The course consists of an introduction and three units that analytically divide the main trends into economic, political and social. The introduction reviews historical trends of urban development and redevelopment and discusses key concepts of justice (social, environmental, recognitional, and distributional). Following, the first unit examines current economic trends in urban development. Within the economic unit we examine issues such as urban densification, private-public partnership and gentrification. The second unit examines political trends in managing and developing the urban space such as regime coalitions, democratization of local governments, and local-global conflicts. The third unit – the social trend – examines bottom-up trends or efforts to increase social engagement in urban development.
The course teaches students to examine the urban space though three main aspect of economic, political and social considerations and to surface, through the issue of justice, difficult questions of ethic and value in planning and urban development.