World Urban Geography

Course Overview

We live in an era defined by unprecedented urban expansion—where more than half of humanity now calls the city home. Urban spaces have become the crucibles of political struggle, economic transformation, and cultural creativity. They are also the primary sites where global flows of people, capital, and ideas converge, and reshape the lived landscape. This course investigates the diverse geographies of urbanization across the world, exploring how historical trajectories, power relations, and environmental conditions shape distinctive urban forms and experiences. Through a world-regional lens, we will trace the interconnected processes that link cities across the Global North and South, examining how global and local forces co-produce urban change across the world.

Drawing on case studies from multiple continents, students will engage foundational theories in urban geography while exploring key intersections among political, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions of city life. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze urbanization as a spatial and socio-political process—developing a nuanced understanding of place, power, and inequality in the making of contemporary urban worlds. Emphasis will be placed on interpreting current events and urban transformations in major cities across diverse world regions.

All students who successfully complete the course will receive a Certificate of Completion and have the opportunity to request a Syracuse University credit transcript.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify major patterns of urbanization across world regions and explain the historical, political, and economic forces that have shaped them.
• Analyze how U.S. urban development and global capitalism are intertwined with urban processes in the Global South and other parts of the world.
• Examine how international flows of labor, capital, technology, and culture connect American cities to global urban networks.
• Interpret the uneven geographies of power, inequality, and environmental change that shape urban life globally and locally.
• Compare diverse models of urban governance, planning, and infrastructure, and assess how they reflect different political and economic systems.
• Critically evaluate media and policy narratives about “global cities,” development, and modernization from multiple world perspectives.
• Develop spatial literacy and a sense of global citizenship by situating American urban experiences within broader planetary urban transformations.

Course Information

Course Prefix and Number: GEO 105

Format: On Campus (at Syracuse University)

Eligibility: Students must be of rising high school junior or senior status – or a 2026 high school graduate. 

Credit: 3 credits

Grading:

• Credit: A-F

Cost:

• Residential: $5,595
• Commuter: $4,624

Program rates are subject to change and will be approved by the board of trustees. Discounts and scholarships are also available.

Program Information

Summer College – On Campus: Experience what college is really like: take a college-level course, live in a residence hall, have meals with friends in a dining hall, and participate in activities and events on campus.

I am an urban geographer whose research explores the politics of water, infrastructure, and everyday life in South Asian cities, with a particular focus on Dhaka, Bangladesh. My work engages with questions of justice, ecology, and urban transformation through the lenses of political ecology and southern urbanism—approaches that foreground knowledge, experience, and theory emerging from the Global South.

Drawing on ethnographic and spatial research, I examine how urban residents negotiate water scarcity, informality, and governance within rapidly changing environments. My scholarship highlights how urban life in South Asia interacts with dominant, Euro-American models of urban theory, offering new ways to understand cities as lived, contested, and co-produced spaces.

In the classroom, I try to bring these perspectives to the study of World Urban Geography, guiding students to see cities as interconnected sites of global processes and local struggles. I invite learners to think critically about how American urbanization is entangled with urban transformations elsewhere—through flows of capital, climate, and care—and to view Southern urbanism/Global urbanism as a vital signifier for reimagining what the “urban” means in a global context.

Bio TBD