Vision, Tourism, Imperialism: Art and Travel in the British Empire, 1760-1870 (HART0124)

This course traces the negotiations of British art with the image-making of other places through the conflictual artistic practices anticipated and produced by the figure of travel. The expansion of an art market in 18th-century Britain, a parallel investment in pleasure touring (Britain, Europe and beyond), the East India Company's colonization of India and the institutionalized, metropolitan sponsorship of projects of exploration in Polynesia, Melanesia and Tibet generated conflicting visual economies of travel. Located in the historical framework of the Second British Empire, the course will explore the agency of the visual in the construction of other places, peoples and temporalities through an exciting range of media and ideas. This endorses a set of preliminary questions: what might be 'eye-witness precision' or quasi-scientific objectivity, 'authenticity' or an aesthetic of the Exotic? How far did this entanglement of art and travel embody a charged semiotics of nostalgia? Did British/colonial artists create an auratic sense of place whereby objects, peoples and spaces became signs of themselves? And what are the tensions between materiality and visuality enacted by travel? In the later parts of the course we track alternative regimes of travel as figured by the dialectic of tourism and pilgrimage in 19th-century India.

This module explores strategic action in urban development policy, planning and management. It reviews the evolution of urban development planning approaches...

Urban Development Policy, Planning and Management: Strategic Action in Theory and Practice (DEVP0029)

This module explores strategic action in urban development policy, planning and management. It reviews the evolution of urban development planning approaches and unpacks the theoretical and methodological challenges facing contemporary urban development practice.

Applied to rapidly urbanizing and increasingly unequal cities of the Global South, strategic action presents a framework through which to think planning differently with students encouraged to engage reflexively with contemporary urban challenges and consider how to plan with diverse urban communities in order to transform urban areas into places where women and men of different classes, ethnic groups, religions and ages, can exercise real individual and collective choice in their lives.

Engaging with case material from cities of the Global South and Global North, the module draws connections from these cases to current debates on strategic action for socio-spatial justice. It then explores the implications of these debates for problem diagnosis, participation, organisational development and ‘public learning’ in strategic urban action.

The module comprises lectures, group work session and discussion forum contributions. It is assessed through two, equally weighted, coursework submissions in Terms 1 and 2.

 