Course detail

Political Economy of Cities

FA-PEC-ZEAcad. year: 2025/2026

This course examines notions, arguments and agendas, inherent in the main paradigms of the political economy of cities. Course’s central conceptual theme is socio-economic differentiation of urban environments starting from mid- 19th century – its major tendencies, historical and geographical varieties, causes and consequences, as well as its controllability. The main emphasis of the course lies on policies of spatially mediated inequalities and conflicts in social processes.

Language of instruction

English

Number of ECTS credits

3

Mode of study

Not applicable.

Guarantor

Assoc. Prof. Siarhei Liubimau, Dr.

Department

European Humanities University ()

Aims

  • Acquaintance with the main conceptual approaches to urban development and planning dilemmas in 19-21 centuries.
  • Course seminars incentivize students to approach causal explanations of unequal and conflictual socio-economic differentiation of urban environment from the point of view of methodologies appropriate for these explanations; as well as to recognize those arguments’ implications for urban development and planning policies.
  • Students scrutinize and learn to dismantle the most influential explanations and interpretations of unequal and conflictual socio-economic differentiation of urban environments in the 19th, 20th and early 21st century. 
  • Students are able to conceptually approach current urban planning agendas in the long-term historical socio-political context.
  • Students are able to critically analyze current urban policy agendas employing the conceptual apparatus of established political research on cities.

Rules for evaluation and completion of the course

  • Oral examination (25%, at the examination session)
  • Individual semester paper (50%, at the end of the course)
  • Individual oral presentation (25%, right after the presentation)

Study aids

Not applicable.

Prerequisites and corequisites

Not applicable.

Basic literature

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” in The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press, pp. 14-26 (EN)
Brenner, Neil and Schmid Christian. 2015. “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban” in City 19(2-3): pp. 151-182 (EN)
Burgess, Ernest W. 1984. “The Growth of the City. An Introduction to a Research Project” in The City, Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W. and McKenzie D. Roderick (eds.), pp. 47-63 (EN)
Castells, Manuel. 1979. The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. The MIT Press (EN)
Cocchia, Annalisa. 2014. “Smart and Digital City: A Systematic Literature Review” in Renata Paola Dameri and Rosenthal-Sabroux, Camille (Eds.) Smart City. How to Create Public and Economic Value with High Technology in Urban Space, pp. 13-43 (EN)
Collier, Stephen J. 2011 Post-Soviet Social. Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton University Press, pp. 39-83 (EN)
Currid, Elizabeth. 2009. “Bohemia as Subculture; “Bohemia” as Industry: Art, Culture, and Economic Development” in Journal of Planning Literature 23, pp. 368-382 (EN)
Engels, Friedrich. 2010. “The Condition of the Working-Class in England” in Marx & Engels Collected Works. Volume 4. Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book. pp. 295-596 (EN)
Gandy, Matthew. 1999. “The Paris Sewers and the Rationalization of Urban Space” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24(1), pp. 23-44 (EN)
Harvey, David. 1982. “The Organization of Space Relations” in Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 102-112 (EN)
Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell, pp. 67-98 (EN)
Harvey, David. 2009. Social Justice and the City. The University of Georgia Press. pp. 50-118 (EN)
Hirt, Sonia. 2013. “Whatever Happened to the (Post) Socialist City”?. Cities, 32, 29-38 (EN)
Charter of Athens (1933) (EN)
Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books (EN)
Kitchin, Rob. 2014. «The Real-time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism» in GeoJournal 79 (1), pp. 1-14 (EN)
Lefebvre, Henri. 2013. “Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis” in Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, Brenner, Neil, (ed.). Jovis. pp. 566-570 (EN)
Logan, John R. and Molotch, Harvey L. 2007. Urban Fortunes. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-199. (EN)
Marx, Carl. 1852. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (EN)
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 1 (EN)
Mumford Lewis. 1970. The Culture of Cities. San Diego: A Harvest/HBJ Book, pp. 143-222 (EN)
Musil, Jiri. 1980. Urbanization in Socialist Countries. London: Routledge (EN)
Plantin, Jean-Christophe and Lagoze, Carl, Edwards, Paul N and Sandvig, Christian. 2018. “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook” in New Media and Society 20 (1), pp. 293-310 (EN)
Sassen, Saskia. 2007. A Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, pp. 97-128 (EN)
Scott, Allen J. 2001. “Capitalism, Cities and the Production of Symbolic Forms”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Vol. 26.1, pp. 11-23 (EN)
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, pp. 147-222 (EN)
Sennett, Richard. 1970. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. New York: Knopf, pp. 3-105 (EN)
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in On Individuality and Social Forms. The University of Chicago Press, pp. 324-339 (EN)
Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development. Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell: pp. 97-159 (EN)
Soderstrom, Ola; Paasche, Till and Klauser, Francisco. 2014. «Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling» in City 18(3), pp. 307-320 (EN)
Sykora, Ludek and Bouzarovski, Stefan. 2012. “Multiple Transformations: Conceptualizing the Post-communist Urban Transition” in Urban Studies 49(1), pp. 43- 60 (EN)
Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in The American Journal of Sociology 44(1), pp. 1-24 (EN)
Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Culture of Cities. Blackwell Publishers, pp. 1-48 (EN)

Recommended reading

Dremaite, Marija. 2017. Architecture and Housing in Soviet Lithuania. DOM Publishers (EN)
Gold, John R. 1998. “Creating the Charter of Athens: CIAM and the Functional City, 1933-43” in The Town Planning Review 69(3), pp. 225-247 (EN)
Schorske, Carl E. 1981. “The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and The Birth of Urban Modernism” in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna. Politics and Culture, pp. 24-115 (EN)
Tuvikene, Tauri, Sgibnev, Wladimir and Neugebauer, Carola. 2019. Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures. London: Routledge (EN)

Classification of course in study plans

  • Programme NE_INUS Master's 1 year of study, summer semester, compulsory

Type of course unit

 

Lecture

6 hod., optionally

Teacher / Lecturer

Assoc. Prof. Siarhei Liubimau, Dr.

Syllabus

2) Modernity and the Urban Scale [2 hours]
3) Socialist Modernity and the Urban Scale [1 hour]
4) Political Economy of Industry Led Urbanization [1 hour]
8) Globally Determined Urbanization [1 hour]
10) Digitalization and Urban Environment [1 hour]

Seminar

10 hod., compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

Assoc. Prof. Siarhei Liubimau, Dr.

Syllabus

1) Sociological Imagination and Geographical Imagination [1 hour]
3) Socialist Modernity and the Urban Scale [1 hour]
4) Political Economy of Industry Led Urbanization [1 hour]
5) Ecology of Urban Growth [1 hour]
6) Contestations of Modernist Urbanism [1 hour]
7) City after Industry? [1 hour]
8) Globally Determined Urbanization [1 hour]
9) Central and Eastern European City in early 21st Century [2 hours]
10) Digitalization and Urban Environment [1 hour]