Urban Politics

Urban politics here means treating the city as a contested terrain where power, inequality, and migration actually get worked out on the ground, rather than as a backdrop for policy. You read your way from the classical Chicago School through Lefebvre, Harvey, and postcolonial urbanism, then land hard on the Turkish case — gecekondu politics, urban transformation, and the restructuring of Anatolian cities — with a term paper and weekly response papers doing most of the assessment. It is a graduate seminar, so it builds on undergraduate social theory and feeds into thesis work on cities, governance, or migration.