The commons are natural or technological resources or social and cultural spaces shared among members of a community. Different communities may adopt different practices to manage a commons, or also co-create commons via processes of commonning. This course addresses three basic empirical puzzles in governing the environmental commons: one, why are some actors able to create functional institutions for managing the commons, while many others fail to do so? Two, are there trade-offs between sustainable commons governance and commons governance that is equitable and inclusive, of so, what are they? Three, how do social, economic, and political inequalities shape who has access to and control over the commons? Through the lens of these three questions, the course explores the contextual conditions and institutions structuring human interactions that make for just and sustainable governance.

The course examines the relationship between urban geography, planning, and politics. In particular, it seeks to interrogate the theoretical importance of place, space and urban form in the production of political and social values, practices, strategies, and discourses, and in turn, analyze the implications of the place-politics nexus for understanding shifts in the direction and form of urban policy, governance, identity and citizenship. The course begins with a broad examination of the theoretical bases for linking place and politics, particularly as this relates to the construction of urban and non-urban places, with literature drawn from a number of sources, including geography, urban studies, political science, and planning theory. The course then examines a number of specific cases that inform and challenge our understanding of the relationship between place and political praxis, and the political construction of the city.

This course examines the planning history of Toronto's post-war landscapes using local field trips linked to readings and seminars. Using historical perspectives on the changing character of selected areas, the course explores the planning, creation, reproduction, and evolution of the city's landscapes over time.

This course explores urban spaces that are viewed as problems. Cities, or at least parts of cities, have long been framed as a problem, particularly in large sprawling federalist societies like the United States and Canada. Exactly what those problems are, who they affect, and what should be done (or not done) about them vary over time and space. This is a seminar on the social construction of urban problems. We will explore the tension between on-the-ground challenges such as deprivation, crime, and depopulation, on the one hand, and the way that these problems are deployed by political and economic elites to motivate (or in some cases avoid) change, on the other.

This course focuses on sustainability and communities and neighbourhoods in cities in North America and Europe, with some exploration of examples of community-based sustainability in cities in the global south. The intention of this course is to examine academic and policy discussion on urban sustainability and the contemporary context and future of urban communities, and will address socio-political dimensions of urban sustainability found in human geography and urban planning literatures, rather than focusing on physical or technical applications of sustainability principles.

How are spatial, racial, and class inequalities produced and contested in mutually constituted ways? Why are class inequalities always spatial and racial inequalities? We begin with two theorists who have had an enormous influence on writings on class: Karl Marx and Pierre Bourdieu (a third, Antonio Gramsci, will be considered through Stuart Hall). We follow this with key writings in the geographical traditions by Ruthie Gilmore, David Harvey, and Doreen Massey. I give priority to the race-class-power nexus through the work of Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, C L R James, Cedric Robinson, W E B Du Bois, and a number of exciting and relevant monographs.

This seminar investigates articulations of aesthetic, technological and political forces in the production of space — understood as the triad of 'conceived space’, 'perceived space' and 'lived space,' following Henri Lefebvre's influential theorization in The Production of Space. With reference to intellectual resources drawn from several strands of critical theory, space figures here as something radically contested, and dialectically related to social relations. The work of artists, architects, planners, geographers, scientists, technocrats and politicians, along with influential conceptions such as 'modernism,' 'avant-garde,' 'culture industry,' 'spectacle,' 'alienation,' 'governmentality,' 'subjectivity,' 'ideology,' 'decolonization,' 'utopia,' and 'revolution' will feature prominently in this course, in order to theorize how space and society are co-produced, and why various political projects — capitalist, nationalist, fascist, colonial, socialist, feminist — are also spatial projects. As such, the prime objective of this course will be to develop critical-theoretical as well as conjunctural awareness of aesthetic, technological and political mediations of the socio-spatial dialectic — with special attention to the work of architects, urban designers, planners, and geographers in the context of subaltern citizens pursuing their 'right to the city.'

The need to reduce automobile dependence and congestion has been argued widely in recent years, and urban form has been identified as a major aspect influencing choice of travel mode. The combined imperatives of sustainability, healthier cities, and worsening congestion has prompted an increasingly rich body of research on the relationships between urban form, transport infrastructure, and travel patterns, and an array of new methodological approaches to research them. This course critically examines this research and examines planning strategies that seek to influence travel through coordinated transport investment and land use and design control. Both regional and neighbourhood scale issues and strategies will be addressed. The geographic focus of the course will largely be metropolitan regions in Canada and the United States, but there will be opportunity to examine other national contexts.

The presence of cycling in cities has, for some, become the hallmark for the progressive city; progressive from a transport perspective. But how did we get to this point in the history of urban transportation and city life? Has it always been like this? Is more cycling a desirable outcome for everyone? Who cycles and who doesn't, and for what reasons? Adopting an historical and geographical lens, this course answers these questions, and considers the uneven way in which cycling seems to have fallen into and out of favour, locally, nationally, and globally over time. This course will explore cycling's past and present using a mixture of lectures, student-led seminars and presentations, and fieldwork.

In the mid-twentieth century, most cities in the Great Lakes basin were oriented around some form of heavy manufacturing. Forty to fifty percent of the labour force in major cities was involved in manufacturing. Urban form, development, growth patterns, and social conflict were often related to, if not centered on, the manufacturing economy. Since then, all major cities have experienced at least some turn away from heavy centralized manufacturing. This shift has altered the form, social structure, and labor forces of cities throughout the region (and others like it in the Global North). This seminar is devoted to better understanding the post-industrial city. We focus on the post-industrial thumbprint of four areas: 1) socio-spatial polarization; 2) ethno-racial conflict; 3) land use challenges; and 4) socially equitable economic development.

What would it take to build a 'social economy,' an economy rooted in the principles of social justice, democratic governance and local self-reliance? What are the progressive and regressive implications of such an undertaking? This course explores these questions both theoretically and practically: theoretically, with recourse to some canonical and more recent writings about the interface between 'society' and 'economy'; practically, by looking at what role municipal governments could and do play in building the social economy. The course will also consider how communities and neighbourhoods are growing increasingly active in developing alternative economic institutions, such as cooperatives, participatory budgets, and community development financial institutions in order to institutionalize the social economy at the local scale.

This course examines the so-called "cultural turn" in economic geography, often referred to as "the new economic geography." We will begin by considering various ways of theorizing the relationship between culture and economy. After reflecting upon the historical antecedents of contemporary understandings of this relationship, we will explore selected themes in the cultural economy literature such as cultural industries, consumption, economic discourse, work cultures, governmentality, and commodity chains/actor networks.

This is a course about the urban economy. The emphasis is on understanding how agency (initiative) leads political actors in a state to make possible the conditions that give rise to an urban economy. I review and re-interpret fundamental models that explain how the operation of markets in equilibrium shapes the scale and organization of the commercial city in a mixed market economy within a liberal state. The course reviews classic models of the urban economy that assume appurtenant property, contract, and civil rights. As befits the liberal state, such models also presume that individuals and firms are purposeful and have autonomy in these markets. These models raise questions about how and when governance enables and facilitates markets, autonomy, and the urban economy in this way. Overall, the perspective of this course is that it is helpful to see governance (and hence the urban economy) as outcomes negotiated by political actors motivated by competing notions of commonwealth and aggrandizement.

The course discusses a broad range of topics related to innovation and governance including i) technological change and its social and economic consequences, ii) the spatial effects, which result from this, and iii) necessities for innovation policies at different territorial levels. The seminar is divided into three main parts. The first part deals with conceptual foundations of innovation, and explores the connection between economic learning, knowledge creation and innovation processes. In the second part, innovation and governance are investigated in territorial context, ranging from national and subnational innovation systems to permanent and temporary clusters and varieties of capitalism. The third part of the course discusses aspects of transnational innovation processes and multilevel governance challenges.

The space-economy has always been characterized by polarization across many dimensions. As a result, regional economic change has proved very difficult to fully explain using conventional theories and methods. This course examines the theoretical linkage between related trends of globalization, vertical disintegration, technological and organizational innovation, regional specialization, and the locational behaviour of firms. We will focus on the seemingly counter-intuitive finding that regional economic change in a time of increasing global interdependence is only becoming more dependent on the local context. We will see why economic activity is becoming ever more concentrated in space even as it globalizes.

Across its contested meanings, modernity is associated with transformations — of places, experiences, governance, and social worlds. The purpose of this course is to investigate these transformations through grounded historical study of urban landscapes and lives, drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship across the geographic humanities but also on varieties of popular culture. Focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course will draw on a diverse range of case studies to consider the making and meanings of modern urban spaces, and the limits and differential experiences of urban modernity.

This seminar investigates geographies of violence, security, and resistance through an engagement with infrastructures of empire. We will consider infrastructure in its breadth and specificity, looking to both the socio-technical systems that enable uneven connection and circulation (pipelines, roads, rail, ports, damns), as well as infrastructures' social, intimate, and affective forms. In this sense, an investigation of infrastructure allows us to explore what underpins and enables the everyday material life of empire, and its alternatives. The course takes as its starting point that infrastructure has a long and violent history in sculpting space and creating dis/connection in the assembly of racial capitalism, biopolitics, settler colonialism, and imperialism. We will engage the increasingly critical and ubiquitous presence of infrastructure in the context of a securitized, financialized, and logistical geopolitical economy. Yet the course is also invested in the making of infrastructure otherwise by movements and communities that refuse or redirect the circulation of the status quo. We will examine a diverse range of struggles over infrastructure, a wide variety of means of conceptualizing infrastructure, and efforts to resist, repair, and rebuild infrastructures emerging out of especially Indigenous, queer and trans, and Black politics and movements.

This seminar focuses on the politics of contemporary global migration processes with particular attention to the gender dimensions. It examines the geographic literature on transnationalism and diaspora to develop insight into the theoretical ramifications of critical political-economy, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and feminism.

This course will introduce students to Marxist, feminist, anticolonial and intersectional perspectives on 'work' in the twenty-first century. A key intention of this course is to prompt students to examine what forms of work — and also whose work — has been taken into account in geographical scholarship and to explore a number of prominent debates concerning labour, work, and employment within geography over the last three decades. We will also examine a number of broad economic and cultural shifts in the nature of contemporary work and employment such as de-industrialization, the feminization of labour markets and service sector work, neoliberalization and the rise of the 'precariat.' At the same time, students will be prompted to consider critiques of some of these 'transformational' narratives to probe the colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist continuities shaping the contours of contemporary work. Overall this course aims to give students the chance to explore not only how work has been conceptualized and studied in geography, but how it could be.

This is a full-year service-learning course that facilitates practical experience in community-engaged planning. Service-learning is a reciprocal work placement between students and community partners. Students are placed with a public or non-profit sector organization for one day per week, on average, from early October to late March to work in community development and planning. Placement organizations practice a range of planning-related work, including housing, transportation, social planning, and environmental initiatives. We meet as a class in a seminar format to support the students' work, reflect on theory and practice, and to learn from one another’s experiences. This placement can fulfil Master of Sciece in Planning students' internship requirement.

The world is seeing a clear resurgence of the urgency of directly and explicitly addressing the needs of equity deserving groups in a way that builds on but goes beyond the remit of identity politics. Key to a justice approach to social policy and planning is understanding how policy shapes a landscape of inclusion and exclusion and how ordinary people come to be "read," rightly or wrongly, as particular subjects based on the prescriptive aspects of policy. We are now at a moment when diverse social movements are beginning to take upon themselves the reimagining or promotion of much more ambitious alternative modes of governance, which would replace rather than simply amend existing structures. This can be found in widespread calls the redesign of institutional landscapes, from defunding of the police to expansive programs of truth and reconciliation. This course calls upon us to rethink participation, consultation, experiential knowledge and our engagement with existing power structures — this is not the moment to abandon social planning, but the time to reinvent it.

Globalization processes and changes in immigration laws in recent decades have led to an upsurge in cross-border movement of people and ushered in sequential waves of immigration from various regions of the world to Canada and the U.S. Cities and their adjoining metropolitan areas are the biggest beneficiaries of these changing dynamics where immigrants are important contributors to economic growth and social reinvigoration. This course will examine the dynamics and changing patterns of immigrant integration in cities and urban locations. Topics of focus will include theories of immigrant integration, socio-spatial patterns of immigrant settlements in cities, labour market participation, socio-cultural identity formation and transnational engagements. The course will rely on contemporary examples and case studies to provide a deeper understanding of how immigrants are shaping dynamics within cities.

What are the health consequences of recent transformations in sexuality and intimate relationships? How are intimate geographies of disease spatialized? This course explores connections between intimacy, geography, and health particularly through the lens of sexually transmitted infections. The course takes as its starting point the recent turn from medical geography towards a more qualitative, theoretically driven, health geography. It draws from research in countries that include Papua New Guinea, the Dominican Republic, and South Africa.

Can we think about Islam beyond the East/West divide? Where do Muslim geographies begin and end? Why do stereotypes like the "Muslim terrorist" and the "oppressed veiled woman" persist? This course explores these questions by examining how Muslim identities and Islam have been socially, culturally, and politically constructed across different times and places.

We begin by critically engaging with theories of liberal democracy and secularism, exploring how they have shaped the positioning of Islam within Western colonial epistemologies and Orientalism. Drawing from geography, postcolonial theory, anthropology, and religious studies, the course challenges the dominance of Western geographic thought by analyzing diverse ways Islam has been lived and understood in different contexts.

Key topics include Muslim femininity and piety, Islamist movements and nationalism, Islamophobia, cultural and creative industries, and the relationship between secularism, urban planning, and the built environment. Through decolonial, anti-capitalist, and anarchist frameworks, students will examine the multiplicity of Muslim experiences in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority settings.

This course is an interdisciplinary endeavor to consider these and related questions. Bringing geography into tension with history, anthropology, sociology, and planning, the course’s emphasis is on social context of drug use rather than an individual’s addiction/dependence. Examples are taken from Canada, the U.S., South Africa, Iran, and other settings.

What is disability? What is ableism? What is everyday life like for disabled people (and why haven't I used the phrase "persons with disability" here)? What does it mean to think about disability intersectionally? What is the relationship between disability rights and justice? Where and how do "place" and "time" enter this conversation? How have disability and ableism been produced and sustained by geography and planning (scholarship, education, and practice)? These are just some of the questions we will engage in this course. We begin by working through the ontological and epistemological debates about disability and ableism. From there, we move closer to the everyday lives of persons with disabilities (why am I using "persons with disability" now?). We will spend time considering what it means to "decolonize" disability studies. You will spend time in the field exploring the issue of rights, justice, accessibility standards, and compliance. Guest speakers are invited to discuss their research, and their relationship to disability, ableism, and place. You will be challenged to critically consider what disability and ableism are, the ways in which regions, cities, and institutions disable, and how you relate to disability and ableism in your everyday life.

Beyond a physical region, the Atlantic can be understood as a site through which techniques for the exploitation of land, people, and the environment emerged, with enduring implications for world trajectories. This course traces a genealogy of contested spacetimes spanning the colonial state, the plantation, and urban neighborhoods and streets. We learn about representations of Blackness as they are made and remade through time such as: the "dangerous Blacks" of the Haitian revolution; the British West Indian ex-slave "unwilling" to work; a sanitized version of the Black small farmer; the anti-colonialist land invader; and the "illegal squatter" who is no longer recognized as a descendant of Black refusal. Among the traditions we explore are rebellion, revolution, and quotidian acts of place-making through farming, fishing, street vending, beauty services, taxi operation, masquerade, and dwelling. Through these representations and practices we explore the epistemologies of this ongoing encounter and also work to uncover the gendering of complex racial formations.

This course invites students to consider what it means to conduct research on Indigenous land. It is intended not only for students working with Indigenous communities but for all students developing place-based research. We begin with Indigenous approaches to the politics, agency, relationality, and ethics of Place, followed by anti-colonial and Indigenous approaches to research, what Tuck and McKenzie (2015) call Indigenous informed critical place inquiry. Attentive to methodology, what Margaret Kovach (2009) describes as knowledge belief system and methods, students will reflect on their worldview, relations of accountability, and the uneven politics of knowledge production with and on Indigenous lands. Ultimately, students will consider what research/professional design and practice look like when Place, Indigenous sovereignty, and host/guest/treaty responsibilities are meaningfully considered. The first half of this seminar course will focus on Indigenous theories and frameworks of Place and coexistence, the second half on Indigenous and anti-colonial research methodologies and knowledge mobilization. Topics for discussion may include Place and Land; Indigenous jurisdiction and governance; researcher preparation and relational accountability; Indigenous research paradigms, ethics, and knowledge sovereignty; critical land-based methods; interpretive analysis, narrative, and knowledge mobilization.

The term "Utopia" is a combination of the Greek words Eutopia (meaning 'good place') and Outopia (meaning 'no place'). This course explores classic and contemporary Utopian thought — in theory, literature, and practice — and will discuss the perils and pitfalls associated with the development of utopias (both imagined and "actually existing"). Our exploration of this topic will involve reading scholarly work within and outside geography, as well as examples of Utopian and dystopian literature. Key themes include how issues of social relation, ecological sustainability, governance, planning, and participation are addressed in Utopia(s).