Geography Single Honours (Level 3)
Human Geography Major (Level 3)
Sociology Dual Honours (Level 3)
Sociology Major (Level 3)
Sociology Minor (Level 3)
$ùTo be tired of the city is to be tired of life&©
The city is exciting, alluring, dangerous and filled with possibilities and opportunities. It offers hustle and bustle, speed and distraction, a melting pot of sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in a cosmopolitan mix of multi-culturalism. It is simplistic to say that all activities and interactions take place in space. But as the city is at the centre of the modern urban world more and more of what we take for granted takes place in towns and cities. They are the primary location for work, production, consumption, education, learning, cultural and transport institutions and leisure and pleasure. However, the city is more than the sum of its parts and it is more than merely the individual&©s experience of it.
This course will give you knowledge and understanding of the city as a socially constructed space in which the physical landscape that we see, use and misuse is not an accidental or coincidental coming-together of things and people. The city is a human produced space in which combinations of factors over time have produced a variety of urban spaces that increasingly dominate our existence and our experience. However, everyone&©s experience and opportunity of the city is not the same. There are winners and losers and we can readily identify areas and people in which relative success and failure is written into the landscape of the city.
This course will give you new tools to develop new ways of thinking about the world - a socio-spatial imagination - to explore and understand how cities have developed in the way they have, what role planning and urban design have played, how and why the production, regulation and organisation, the policing and surveillance of urban space affects how and why different people settle and live in different areas, what limits there are to physical movement and social mobility. In short, by thinking more critically about space, cities will never seem the same again.
Information on our MA in Urban Futures and Sustainable Communities is available at
http://www.keele.ac.uk/urban-futures/
Any reading lists will be provided by the start of the course.
http://lists.lib.keele.ac.uk/modules/soc-30027/lists
- Critically assess and evaluate social theories of space
- Apply socio-spatial concepts and perspectives to the analysis of a number of cities as case studies
- Apply socio-spatial concepts and perspectives to the analysis of a number of substantive examples (e.g. gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity)
- Apply an understanding of the value of spatial theories to the analysis of urban societies
- Apply systematic understandings of key aspects of theoretical and empirical research and communicate these in written form
- Evaluate complex sociological texts and identify possible directions for further theoretical and/or empirical research in Sociology
- Apply independent and critical thinking to define and solve problems through the interpretation and evaluation of research concerned with the urban and the city
10 Hours of Workshops/Seminars
40 Hours Essay Preparation
50 Hours Exam Preparation
40 Hours Workshop/Seminar
TOTAL 150 HOURS
Students will write an essay chosen from a number of choices on the theoretical element provided in the first part of the course
Students will answer 2 questions from a choice of 6 based on the substantive element covered in the latter part of the course
This document is the definitive current source of information about this module and supersedes any other information.