Global Urban Theory Lab: Extended and Displaced Urbanisation

Explore global urbanisation, learning from African contexts

This course provides an opportunity to learn about and build insights from one of Africa’s most dynamic urban regions, the Gauteng City-region, comprising more than 15 million people. South Africa provides an excellent opportunity to contribute to theory-building about the processes of displaced and extended urbanisation.

Build your understanding of new urbanisation processes

Extended and displaced urbanisation leads to sprawling and fragmented urban regions, as well as new urban settlements emerging in remote regions around the world, often in response to extractive economic activities and infrastructure corridors. South Africa provides an excellent context for exploring these trends - apartheid-era legislation created urban settlements far from jobs and city centres; some are now arguably dynamic centres of autonomous urbanism, but still closely connected to metropolitan regions like Gauteng.

Develop your own insights and contribute to urban theory-building

Explore the case of Johannesburg through bespoke videos, expert interviews and guided reading of academic and policy texts, and draw on your own knowledge and experience of other contexts, to interpret processes of extended and displaced urbanisation. Join in a directed process of developing your own conceptualisations of these new aspects of global urbanisation.

Address governance challenges of displaced urbanisation

Confront the governance hurdles of managing extended urban regions and displaced urbanisation. Explore emergent governance models and planning challenges of displaced and extended urbanisation in the Gauteng region, reflecting on strategies for services and infrastructure management in rapidly expanding urban landscapes.

This course is designed for urban studies students, professionals in urban governance, and anyone interested in urbanisation, particularly in the African context.

It’s ideal for those aiming to understand trends in global urbanisation and urban governance.

This course is designed for urban studies students, professionals in urban governance, and anyone interested in urbanisation, particularly in the African context.

It’s ideal for those aiming to understand trends in global urbanisation and urban governance.

• Develop insights and understanding of contemporary global processes of extended urbanization.
• Explore the urbanizing region of Johannesburg, South Africa, focusing on the history, transformation and present challenges of the Gauteng city-region of which Johannesburg is a part.
• Interpret the global phenomenon of extended and dispersed urbanization, through detailed assessment of evidence relating to the South African example of displaced urbanisation.
• Critique complex and theoretical academic texts, and have opportunities to practice application of skills of reading and analysis.
• Create conceptual insights on urbanization processes relevant to the diversity of urban contexts across the globe, with a particular emphasis on African urban experiences.
• Evaluate information and data on urban processes, and their value in informing public policy and decision-making.