The School of Mind & Society · the social sciences
Human Geography & Urban Studies
Why people live where they live, and how streets, borders, and maps quietly decide so much.
Population, culture, and land: the patterns people make on the surface of the earth.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~22 hours
Unit I — Reading the Map
Space, place, and scale · Maps as arguments · Regions: formal, functional, perceptual
Unit II — Population & Movement
The demographic transition · Migration: push and pull · Urbanization worldwide
Unit III — Culture on the Land
Language and religion as spatial patterns · Agriculture and land use · Development and its geography
How cities work: land, housing, transit, and the daily negotiation of shared space.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~28 hours
Unit I — Why Cities Exist
Agglomeration · A short history of urban form · Models of urban structure and their limits
Unit II — Housing & Land
Land markets and rent · Segregation: causes and measurement · The gentrification debates
Unit III — Moving Through the City
Transit and the geometry of commuting · Sprawl and density · Public space
Unit IV — Urban Futures
Informal settlements · Climate adaptation in cities · Urban governance: who gets to decide
Cartographic judgment and GIS craft: projections, layers, and maps that don't mislead.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Cartographic Foundations
Projections and their distortions · Scale, symbols, and classification · How maps mislead
Unit II — GIS Fundamentals
Vector and raster data · Coordinate reference systems · Joins, buffers, and overlays
Unit III — Spatial Analysis
Choropleth pitfalls and normalization · Spatial autocorrelation · Interpolation
Unit IV — A Map of Your Own
Finding open spatial data · Designing a thematic map · Critique and revision
Why people move, what borders do, and how migration remakes both ends of the journey.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — Theories of Movement
Push-pull models and their limits · Networks and chain migration · Forced displacement
Unit II — Borders
The modern passport regime · Enforcement and its geography · Refugee law and asylum
Unit III — After Arrival
Remittances and development · Assimilation and transnational lives · The politics of migration
Zoning, streets, and plans: the quiet documents that decide what gets built where.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — A Short History of Planning
Sanitary reform to garden cities · Modernism and its discontents · Jacobs versus Moses
Unit II — The Planner's Tools
Comprehensive plans · Zoning and land-use law · Environmental and traffic review
Unit III — Planning in Practice
Public participation, real and staged · The housing-supply debates · Reading a site: a capstone exercise