1. The organisation of contemporary urban economies, including the production of built and virtual environments, physical and social infrastructure.
2. The ways in which different forms of economic accumulation and economic practices impact upon cities, and how any city reflects a particular set of constraints and possibilities.
3. The proliferation of technical systems, media, and practices of interpretation and organization which change our notions about the proper" use of things and bodies. These changed notions generate new opportunities for individual and collective life, but also potentially diminish the capacity of people from different walks of life to take each other into consideration.
4. The intersections of finance, governance, ecology, and culture in producing multiple forms for assessing urban futures-particularly calculations of risk, sustainability, productivity and creativity. How to work with different institutional sectors, national and regional contexts, and transnational organizations, as well as circuits of migration and knowledge production.
5. How teachers, researchers, professionals, activists, planners, entrepreneurs, and artists - all possible constituencies for this program - can conceptualise and operationalise work, projects, and careers that take them across various geographical locales, institutional domains, discourses, and social networks.

Given the various inter-weavings of these threads, the key educational challenge concerns what it is possible for cities and urban life to do and how. How can individuals and groups navigate these architectures and circuitries of powers; how do they participate in the open-ended possibilities embodied by new configurations of collective action, simultaneously occasioning both emergency and potentiality; how can teachers, researchers, professionals, activists, entrepreneurs, and artists – all possible constituencies for this program – conceptualise and operationalise work, projects, and careers that take them across various geographical locales, institutional domains, discourses, and social networks?

This programme develops the core strengths of Goldsmiths and its internationally recognised Department of Sociology. The programme is hosted within the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) and forms part of the Department of Sociology’s portfolio of Master’s programmes. CUCR is an interdisciplinary research centre with interests in the investigation of contemporary city life that cross the humanities and social sciences. Alongside the MA in World Cities and Urban Life, CUCR also runs a complementary MA in Photography and Urban Cultures.  Students from both MA programmes have the opportunity, though not the obligation, to participate in the research culture of the Centre, which has over the last seven years produced a running programme of seminars, conferences, urban walks and screenings.

What you study

The programme consists of three core courses,

• Remaking Urban Life: from Dakar to Guangzhou
• Navigating Urban Life
• Inventive Methods for Researching the City

and a specialist Sociology option course drawn from the Department’s extensive list of option courses offered at MA level.

The core course Remaking Urban Life: from Dakar to Guangzhou establishes cities from the Global South as the key platform through which to look at contemporary urbanisation processes. It considers what it means to live in cities that operate at the confluence of incorporations into various regional economies, the reiteration of historical singularities regarding the nature of urban life, and the proliferation of new infrastructures which combine to produce highly mutable spaces and experiences.

It consequently has a particular importance in equipping students with:

• a unique understanding of the interface between theory and practice in the analysis and engagement of urban systems and urbanised ways of life;
• a sophisticated understanding of debates around the production of knowledge about the city.

The core course Navigating Urban Life focuses on the cultural theory, politics and representation of the globalising city, and so consequently has a particular importance in equipping students with:

• a unique understanding of the interface between theory and practice in the representation of urban cultures;
• a sophisticated understanding of different methodologies in carrying out research in complex urban settings;
• an advanced competence in producing a research-based dissertation in the humanities and social sciences;
• an advanced fluency with current debates in critical cultural theory around the city;
• an advanced understanding of the theoretical debates in contemporary urban studies;
• a sophisticated understanding of debates around the production of knowledge about the city.

The core course Inventive Methods for Researching the City focuses on the entry points or devices that permit investigation, particularly of contexts where what had been assumed to have been kept apart or distinct now find themselves thoroughly entangled and stretched out. 

The course emphasises the ability:

• to conduct research in situations where individuals, households, communities, cities, nations, regions, sectors, disciplines, and groups are no longer necessarily the predominant or most salient subjects and objects of processes, actions or events, and no longer the sole launching pads for investigations of the social, even if these distinctions continue to be enforced;
• to rethink urbanising processes as applicable to various scales and entities of consideration that go beyond the “city” or “region”, with an emphasis on examining multiple temporalities in order to supplement the more conventional spatial discourses of urban studies.

As such, the course promotes:

• a unique understanding of the interface between theory and practice in the analysis of cities and urban life;
• a sophisticated understanding of different methodologies in carrying out research in complex urban settings.

Teaching

One hour lectures address the core themes of each course, followed by one hour seminars in small groups (under 20). You will be encouraged to attend dissertation classes that help to prepare the basic principles of dissertation preparation, research and writing. You are also assigned a dissertation supervisor that you can expect to be available for a limited amount of contact time throughout the period of writing the dissertation (approximately 1 hour contact time / month).

Assessment

Essays and dissertation.

MA granted on the completion of 180 CATS (all coursework and dissertation); Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education granted on the completion of 120 CATS (all coursework without dissertation); Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education granted on the completion of 60 CATS (the completion of two core courses).

Register your interest

If you register your interest in this programme we will keep you informed about open days and send you relevant further information. If you subsequently decide to apply for this programme you will be able to use the same login details to apply.