in Europe

2022-2023

Assessment in this module is via submission of two coursework components.

Assessment	Weighting	Due
Individual essay (2,500words)	80%	15 January 2021, 2pm
Seminar (preparatory note, presentation and participation)	20%	Different deadlines throughout the module

SEMINAR BRIEF

1. Description of assignment

This component (20%) of assessment will take the form of independent readings and team discussion leading to:
- the submission of a 500-word individual preparatory reading note on assigned texts (10% of final grade).
- the preparation and delivery of a team presentation (10% of final grade). Do not submit the presentation in advance.
- the facilitation of a 60-minute group discussion (0% of final grade)
The assessment of this assignment is individual, although it includes elements delivered as part of a team.

How it works

At the start of the term, students are divided into seminar groups of 15-20 students supported by a dedicated tutor. Each seminar group is organised into presentation teams of 4-5 students.
Each student is assigned to a seminar group and to a presentation team. Students cannot choose or change group / team.
There are four seminar sessions (21/10, 28/10, 25/11, 2/12) during the term. Each student will only be assessed once during the term and for one of the four seminars. The assessment includes:
- the submission of a preparatory reading note
- the preparation of a presentation together with your team and the delivery of the presentation to the seminar group
- the facilitation of the group discussion
Each presentation team is allocated a seminar date, topic and required readings. The date and topic of the seminar session cannot be changed except for extenuating circumstances that must be requested and approved by the programme director. The module coordinator or tutors do not have the authority to allow changes to the allocated presentation date.

2. Dates and topics for group seminars

21 October: Seminar 1 – The impacts of globalisation on planning practices: compare two examples
28 October: Seminar 2 – The changing roles of the state and processes of neoliberalisation in planning: compare two examples
25 November: Seminar 3 – Historical or geographical varieties of state-market relations in the production of the built environment: compare two examples
2 December: Seminar 4 – Historical or geographical varieties of housing production: compare two examples with a focus on housing for low-income groups

Summary
- This is an individual assessment and counts 20% of the final grade.
- Each student is assessed once during the module at an allocated date and for an allocated topic.
- Assessment is based on the submission of an individual preparatory note (10%), contribution to a team presentation (10%) and the facilitation of group discussion (0%)
- Attendance and meaningful participation to ALL seminar sessions is required by ALL students; failure to meaningfully participate will affect the final grade for this component.

3. How to prepare and write the individual reading note (10% of final grade)

All students must submit an individual reading note before each seminar. This forms part of the overall evaluation of students’ meaningful engagement with the module (see paragraph 5).
Students will only be assessed once, on the submission of the preparatory reading note Only students who are also presenting, will have their reading note assessed (10%) as part of this assignment
The preparatory reading note must provide a summary of the assigned readings focusing on:
- Important concepts used or discussed in the texts
- Main argument(s) or proposition(s) and their strengths / weaknesses
- Evidence used
- Implications of the text for the seminar topic
The reading note should be prepared using the template document on the Moodle page and must be submitted as a word document via the relevant Turnitin submission inbox on the Moodle page by Friday of the day of the seminar by 9am.

4. How to prepare and deliver the presentation (10% of final grade)

This is a team presentation. It must provide a clear and coherent answer to the questions raised in the topic description.
Each student in the team must speak during the presentation and contribute to its preparation. Each student will be awarded an individual mark based on clear evidence of individual contribution to the delivery (speaking) of the team’s presentation. Students who do not show evidence of contribution to the team’s presentation, will receive a grade of 0 for this component.
The total duration of the presentation will depend on the number of students in the team but should be 20 minutes maximum. It is up to the students in the team to organise their contributions, but each student must speak during the presentation.
The presentation can use any support: slides, handouts, posters.
DO NOT read your presentation text. No matter how difficult you find presenting, reading verbatim from notes will always produce a worse presentation and will impact your grade. Always speak in your own words.
A good presentation:
- answers the topic questions and sets the ground and goals for the group discussion.
- makes clear references to and draws its argument from the assigned readings.
- does not simply build summaries of each text in isolation but critically discusses the content of the different texts as a body of knowledge, highlights relevant contradictions or convergences in the concepts, arguments, methodologies, case studies.

5. How to run the group discussion (0% of final grade)

The goal of the group discussion is to identify and agree, as a group, on 3 to 4 statements that answer the questions in the proposed topic.
- The statements from all the seminar groups will be discussed and debriefed with the whole class, the tutors, and the module coordinator after the group discussion.
The group discussion should last 60 minutes at the maximum.
Presentation teams are encouraged to prepare in advance how they want to run the discussion and how they plan to build agreement on 3-4 statements.
Recommended group discussion methods include World Cafe (http://theworldcafe.com/), Conversation Cafe (https://involve.org.uk/resources/methods/conversation-cafes), Fishbowl Conversation (https://findmethod.co/facilitation-and-collaboration/the-fishbowl-conversation). When selecting a method, teams should consider the skills available within the team as well as the need to involve more quiet students in the group discussion.
We can provide some resources like whiteboards, flipcharts, markers, but we will need at least 3-day notice to arrange this.
A good group discussion:
- sets clear goals and methods of discussion
- reaches agreement and write 3-4 statements which answer the question(s) set in the topic.
- is designed to involve all students. This might not always happen, especially if students in the group have not prepared in advance for the discussion. If the approach is clearly designed to involve all students, lack of participation from the rest of the group will not affect the grade of the students responsible for facilitating the discussion.

6. Example of seminar’s timetable

Before the seminar

As a team: meet to discuss and select readings; make sure all required readings are covered; meet to prepare the presentation
Individually: read text, write, and submit the preparatory note on one of the required readings (you don’t have to share the preparatory note with the team)

During the seminar (example of running times)

10:00 – 10:05	10:05 – 10:25	10:30 – 11:15	11:15 – 11:30	10:30 – 12:00	12:00 – 13:00
Setting up	Team presentation	Group discussion	Summing up	Break (teams might want to prepare for the debrief)	Debrief with all seminar’s groups
Allocated seminar room		Lecture theatre

7. Assessment of students’ engagement

All students in a seminar group who are not giving a presentation are expected to attend and meaningfully engage with the seminars’ topics and discussions. Meaningful engagement is demonstrated by
- knowledge of the content of the required readings evidenced by submission of a non-assessed preparatory reading note
- active participation (raising and answering questions, pro-active rather than reactive contribution to the discussion, etc).
The module coordinator can review the final grade of students who fail to attend, demonstrate knowledge of the topics and readings, and meaningfully engage during the discussion.

8. Criteria for assessment

In addition to the generic criteria applicable to all essays at the Bartlett School of Planning (see your BSP Student handbook on moodle), the specific criteria applicable to this assessment are:

For the reading note:
- Capacity to identify and summarize the key concept(s) of the texts
- Perceptive and critical understanding of the argument or proposition developed in the texts
- Capacity to use the argument, proposition and concepts in the texts to reflect on the seminar topic
For the presentation:
- Clarity of the structure (overall and of each contribution)
- Coherence of the argument (overall and of each contribution)
- Answers the topic’s question(s) and set the ground for the discussion

9. Summative feedback

The mark and written feedback for each seminar will be returned to you within 10 working days (i.e. 2 weeks, excluding official UCL closure times at Christmas and reading week) via Moodle.

10. Optional “mock-up” seminar discussion for students presenting on Seminar 1

While teams facilitating the group discussion on seminars 2, 3 and 4 will be able to “learn” from the running of seminar 1, teams presenting at the first seminar will not have this possibility.

We have therefore organised an optional “mock-up” (fake) seminar discussion, designed to test and review different approaches to group discussion and how the seminar could be run.

See UCL timetable for day and location of the optional “mock-up” seminar

11. Seminars’ topics and required readings

21 October: Seminar 1 – What are the impacts of globalisation on planning practices? Compare two examples

Required readings (each student choose one for their reading note but all three must be used by the presentation team)

Ward, S.V., 2013. Cities as planning models. Planning Perspectives 28, 295–313.

McCann, E., 2011. Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, 107–130.

Cotella, G. (2020) How Europe hits home? The impact of European Union policies on territorial governance and spatial planning, Géocarrefour, 94(3).

Other recommended readings

Adscheid, T., Schmitt, P., 2021. Mobilising post-political environments: tracing the selective geographies of Swedish sustainable urban development. Urban Research & Practice 14, 117–137.

Barber, L., 2014. (Re)Making Heritage Policy in Hong Kong: A Relational Politics of Global Knowledge and Local Innovation. Urban Studies 51, 1179–1195.

Bassens, D., Meeteren, M. van, 2015. World cities under conditions of financialized globalization: towards an augmented world city hypothesis. Progress in Human Geography 39, 752–775.

Blake, O., Glaser, M., Bertolini, L., te Brömmelstroet, M., 2021. How policies become best practices: a case study of best practice making in an EU knowledge sharing project. European Planning Studies 29, 1251–1271.

Grubbauer, M., 2014. Architecture, Economic Imaginaries and Urban Politics: The Office Tower as Socially Classifying Device: The office tower as socially classifying device in Vienna. Int J Urban Reg Res 38, 336–359.

Guggenheim, M., Söderström, O. (Eds.), 2009. Re-shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form. Routledge, London.

Hall, D., 2013. Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Land Grab. Third World Quarterly 34, 1582–1604.

Janin Rivolin, U., 2017. Global crisis and the systems of spatial governance and planning: a European comparison. European Planning Studies 25, 994–1012.

Leitheiser, S., Follmann, A., 2020. The social innovation–(re)politicisation nexus: Unlocking the political in actually existing smart city campaigns? The case of SmartCity Cologne, Germany. Urban Studies 57, 894–915.

Li, T.M., 2014. What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Trans Inst Br Geogr 39, 589–602.

Olds, K., 1997. Globalizing Shanghai: the ‘Global Intelligence Corps’ and the building of Pudong. Cities 14, 109–123.

Rapoport, E., Hult, A., 2017. The travelling business of sustainable urbanism: International consultants as norm-setters. Environment & Planning A 49, 1779–1796.

Robinson, J., 2016. Thinking cities through elsewhere: Comparative tactics for a more global urban studies. Progress in Human Geography 40, 3–29.

Temenos, C., McCann, E., 2012. The Local Politics of Policy Mobility: Learning, Persuasion, and the Production of a Municipal Sustainability Fix. Environment & Planning A, 44, 1389–1406.

28 October: Seminar 2 – How are the roles of the state changing under processes of neoliberalisation in planning? compare two examples

Required readings (each student choose one for their reading note but all three must be used by the presentation team)

Tasan-Kok, T. and Baeten, G. eds. (2012) Contradictions of Neoliberal Planning. Vol. 102. Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht. (Chapter 1)

Pinson, G., Journel, C.M., 2016. The Neoliberal City – Theory, Evidence, Debates. Territory, Politics, Governance 4, 137–153.

Waterhout, B., Othengrafen, F., Sykes, O., 2013. Neo-liberalization Processes and Spatial Planning in France, Germany, and the Netherlands: An Exploration. Planning Practice & Research 28, 141–159.

Other recommended readings (note: the literature on neoliberalism and planning is vast. This is a very basic selection of readings to get you started on key interpretations)

Brenner, Neil and Theodore, N. (2002) Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’. Antipode 34.3, 349–79.

Brenner, Neil, Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2010) Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks 10.2, 182–222.

Clifford, B. and Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2013) The collaborating planner? Practitioners in the neoliberal age Policy Press.

Fincher, R., Pardy, M. and Shaw, K. (2016) Place-making or place-masking? The everyday political economy of “making place”. Planning Theory & Practice 17.4, 516–36.

Gunder, M. (2010) Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space. Planning Theory 9.4, 298–314.

Harvey, D. (2007) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Illustrated edition. Oxford University Press, U.S.A., Oxford.

Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel cities: from the right to the city to the urban revolution. Verso, New York.

Jones, M. and Ward, K. (2012) Excavating the Logic of British Urban Policy: Neoliberalism as the “Crisis of Crisis-Management”. In Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (eds.), Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Olesen, K. (2014) The neoliberalisation of strategic spatial planning. Planning Theory 13.3, 288–303.

Peck, J. (2001) Neoliberalizing states: thin policies/hard outcomes. Progress in Human Geography.

Peck, J. (2016a) Transatlantic city, part 1: Conjunctural urbanism: Urban Studies 54.1, 4–30.

Peck, J. (2016b) Transatlantic city, part 2: Late entrepreneurialism: Urban Studies 54.2, 327–63.

Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2007) Variegated capitalism. Progress in human geography 31.6, 731–72.

Pinson, G. and Journel, C. M. (2016) The Neoliberal City – Theory, Evidence, Debates. Territory, Politics, Governance 4.2, 137–53.

Sager, T. (2011) Neo-liberal urban planning policies: A literature survey 1990–2010. Progress in Planning 76.4, 147–99.

Shatkin, G. (2014) Reinterpreting the Meaning of the ‘Singapore Model’: State Capitalism and Urban Planning. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.1, 116–37.

Tasan-Kok, T., Hurk, M. van den, Özogul, S. and Bittencourt, S. (2019) Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration. European Planning Studies 27.6, 1107–28.

25 November: Seminar 3 – State-market relations in the production of the built environment change across historical, geographical and planning contexts. How can these relations be understood and compared?

Required readings (each student choose one for their reading note but all three must be used by the presentation team)

Büdenbender, M. and Aalbers, M. B. (2019) How Subordinate Financialization Shapes Urban Development: The Rise and Fall of Warsaw’s Słuzewiec Business District. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43.4, 666–84.

Guironnet, A., Attuyer, K. and Halbert, L. (2016) Building cities on financial assets: The financialisation of property markets and its implications for city governments in the Paris city-region. Urban Studies 53.7, 1442–64.

Liu, Y., Yue, W., Fan, P., Peng, Y. and Zhang, Z. (2016) Financing China’s Suburbanization: Capital Accumulation through Suburban Land Development in Hangzhou. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.6, 1112–33.

Other recommended readings

Adisson, F. and Artioli, F. (2020) Four types of urban austerity: Public land privatisations in French and Italian cities. Urban Studies 57.1, 75–92.

Andreucci, D., García-Lamarca, M., Wedekind, J. and Swyngedouw, E. (2017) “Value Grabbing”: A Political Ecology of Rent. Capitalism Nature Socialism 28.3, 28–47.

Booth, P. (2012) The Unearned Increment: Property and the Capture of Betterment Value in Britain and France. In Ingram, G. K. and Y. Hong (eds.), Value Capture and Land Policies. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, Mass.

Chistophers, B. (2019) The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. Verso Books.

Colenutt, B. (2020) The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis. Policy Press.

Gillespie, T. and Silver, J. (2021) Who Owns the City? The privatisation of public land in Manchester. University of Mancherster and Greater Manchester Housing Action.

Guggenheim, M., Söderström, O. (Eds.), 2009. Re-shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form. Routledge, London.

Haila, A. (1990) The theory of land rent at the crossroads. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8.3, 275–96.

Haila, A. (1991) Four Types of Investment in Land and Property. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 15.3, 343–65.

Haila, A., 2015. Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State. John Wiley & Sons.

Harvey, D. (1978) The urban process under capitalism: a framework for analysis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2.1–3, 101–31.

Louw, E. (2008) Land assembly for urban transformation—The case of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in The Netherlands. Land Use Policy 25.1, 69–80.

Moreno, L. (2014) The urban process under financialised capitalism. City 18.3, 244–68.

Olsson, L. (2018) The Neoliberalization of Municipal Land Policy in Sweden. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42.4, 633–50.

Pike, A., O’Brien, P., Strickland, T. and Tomaney, J. (2019) Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Sonn, J. W. and Shin, H. B. (2020) Contextualizing Accumulation by Dispossession: The State and High-Rise Apartment Clusters in Gangnam, Seoul. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110.3, 864–81.

Stein, S. and Mironova, O. (2020) Public land revisited: municipalization and privatization in Newark and New York City. International Planning Studies 25.3, 247–60.

Triantis, L. (2018) The post-socialist restitution of property as dispossession: Social dynamics and land development in Southern Albania. Land Use Policy 71, 584–92.

Ward, C. and Swyngedouw, E. (2018) Neoliberalisation from the Ground Up: Insurgent Capital, Regional Struggle, and the Assetisation of Land. Antipode 50.4, 1077–97.

Weber, R. (2002) Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment. Antipode 34.3, 519–40.

Weber, R. (2015) From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Whiteside, H. (2019) The state’s estate: Devaluing and revaluing ‘surplus’ public land in Canada. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51.2, 505–26.

2 December: Seminar 4 – Housing production changes across historical, geographical and planning contexts. How can the production of housing for low-income groups be understood and compared?

Required readings (each student choose one for their reading note but all three must be used by the presentation team)

Edwards, M. (2016) The housing crisis and London. City 20.2, 222–37.

Topal, A., Yalman, G.L., Çelik, Ö., 2019. Changing modalities of urban redevelopment and housing finance in Turkey: Three mass housing projects in Ankara. Journal of Urban Affairs 41, 630–653.

Stephens, M., Lux, M., Sunega, P., 2015. Post-Socialist Housing Systems in Europe: Housing Welfare Regimes by Default? Housing Studies.

Other recommended readings

Aalbers, M. B. and Haila, A. (2018) A conversation about land rent, financialisation and housing. Urban Studies 55.8, 1821–35.

Ball, M. (2003) Markets and the Structure of the Housebuilding Industry: An International Perspective. Urban Studies 40.5–6, 897–916.

Ball, M. (2006) Markets & institutions in real estate & construction / Michael Ball. Blackwell, Blackwell Pub, Oxford, Oxford ; Malden, MA.

Belotti, E. (2021) The invisible hand of the shareholding state: the financialization of Italian real-estate investment funds for social housing. Housing Studies 0.0, 1–24.

Chiodelli, F., Coppola, A., Belotti, E., Berruti, G., Clough Marinaro, I., Curci, F. and Zanfi, F. (2020) The production of informal space: A critical atlas of housing informalities in Italy between public institutions and political strategies. Progress in Planning 100495..

Christophers, B. (2014) Wild Dragons in the City: Urban Political Economy, Affordable Housing Development and the Performative World-making of Economic Models: Performative world-making of economic models, UK case. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38.1, 79–97.

Gillespie, T., Hardy, K. and Watt, P. (2021) Surplus to the city: Austerity urbanism, displacement and ‘letting die’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 0308518X211026323.

Glass, M. R., Woldoff, R. and Morrison, L. (2014) Does the middle class have rights to the city? Contingent rights and the struggle to inhabit Stuyvesant Town, New York. International Journal of Housing Policy 14.3, 214–35.

Hodkinson, S. (2019) Safe as houses: Private greed, political negligence and housing policy after Grenfell. Manchester University Press.

Payne, S. (2020) Advancing understandings of housing supply constraints: housing market recovery and institutional transitions in British speculative housebuilding. Housing Studies 35.2, 266–89.

Robertson, M. (2016) The System of Provision for Housing in Selected Case Study Countries, Working Paper No. 193.

Robertson, M. (2017) The great British housing crisis. Capital & Class 41.2, 195–215.

Silver, J. (2018) From Homes to Assets. Housing financialisation in Greater Manchester. Sheffield: Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

Watt, P. (2021) Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London. 1st ed. Policy Press

van den Nouwelant, R., Davison, G., Gurran, N., Pinnegar, S. and Randolph, B. (2015) Delivering affordable housing through the planning system in urban renewal contexts: converging government roles in Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales. Australian Planner 52.2, 77–89