Location of a firm; market formation and areas; agricultural location; urban spatial equilibrium; trade and spatial equilibrium; locational competition; equilibrium for an industry; trade and location.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability
Location of a firm; market formation and areas; agricultural location; urban spatial equilibrium; trade and spatial equilibrium; locational competition; equilibrium for an industry; trade and location.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability
Engages Indigenous perspectives on the environment and environmental issues. Students will think with Indigenous concepts, practices, and theoretical frameworks to consider human-environment relations. Pressing challenges and opportunities with respect to Indigenous environmental knowledge, governance, law, and justice will be explored. With a focus primarily on Canada, the course will include case studies from the US, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Area of Focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; People, Place and Power
This course covers advanced theoretical and practical issues of using GIS systems for research and spatial analysis. Students will learn how to develop and manage GIS research projects, create and analyze three-dimensional surfaces, build geospatial models, visualize geospatial data, and perform advanced spatial analysis. Lectures introduce concepts and labs implement them.
Explores the practice of ethnography (i.e. participant observation) within and outside the discipline of geography, and situates this within current debates on methods and theory. Topics include: the history of ethnography, ethnography within geography, current debates within ethnography, the "field," and ethnography and "development."
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power
This course builds on introductory statistics and GIS courses by introducing students to the core concepts and methods of spatial analysis. With an emphasis on spatial thinking in an urban context, topics such as distance decay, distance metrics, spatial interaction, spatial distributions, and spatial autocorrelation will be used to quantify spatial patterns and identify spatial processes. These tools are the essential building blocks for the quantitative analysis of urban spatial data.
Area of focus: Urban Geography
This course examines issues of urban form and structure, urban growth and planning in the Toronto region. Current trends in population, housing, economy, environment, governance, transport, urban design and planning practices at the local level and the regional scale will be examined critically.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability
Significant recent transformations of geographic knowledge are being generated by the ubiquitous use of smartphones and other distributed sensors, while web-based platforms such as Open Street Map and Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) have made crowd-sourcing of geographical data relatively easy. This course will introduce students to these new geographical spaces, approaches to creating them, and the implications for local democracy and issues of privacy they pose.
Area of focus: Urban Geography
The last 50 years have seen dramatic growth in the global share of population living in megacities over 10 million population, with most growth in the global south. Such giant cities present distinctive infrastructure, health, water supply, and governance challenges, which are increasingly central to global urban policy and health.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability
Examination and discussion of current trends and issues in human geography, with particular emphasis on recent developments in concepts and methods. This course is an unique opportunity to explore a particular topic in-depth, the specific content will vary from year to year.
This course builds on foundational knowledge of spatial analysis to introduce the principles and methods of geographic data science. Emphasizing spatial thinking and computational approaches, students learn how to acquire, clean, and visualize spatial data; identify patterns and relationships across places; and apply advanced analytical techniques to address questions in the social sciences. The course develops practical skills in coding, spatial data management, and reproducible analytical workflows that extend spatial analysis into contemporary data-driven research and policy practice.
This course uses street food to comparatively assess the production of ‘the street’, the legitimation of bodies and substances on the street, and contests over the boundaries of, and appropriate use of public and private space. It also considers questions of labour and the culinary infrastructure of contemporary cities around the world.
Area of Focus: Social/Cultural Geography
Same as FSTC43H3
Deals with two main topics: the origins of environmental problems in the global spread of industrial capitalism, and environmental conservation and policies. Themes include: changes in human-environment relations, trends in environmental problems, the rise of environmental awareness and activism, environmental policy, problems of sustainable development.
Area of focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change
How have social and economic conditions deteriorated for many urban citizens? Is the geographic gap widening between the rich and the poor? This course will explore the following themes: racialization of poverty, employment and poverty, poverty and gender socio-spatial polarization, and housing and homelessness.
Area of focus: People, Place and Power; Urban Sustainability
Explores the social geography of education, especially in cities. Topics include geographical educational inequalities; education, class and race; education, the family, and intergenerational class immobility; the movement of children to attend schools; education and the ‘right to the city.’
Areas of focus: People, Place and Power
Provides an opportunity to engage in a field trip and field research work on a common research topic. The focus will be on: preparation of case study questions; methods of data collection including interviews, archives, and observation; snowballing contacts; and critical case-study analysis in a final report.
An independent studies course open only to students in the Specialist and Major Program in Human Geography. An independent studies project will be carried out under the supervision of an individual faculty member.
This course focuses on the geographies of localized urban environmental issues and spaces with an emphasis on the theories and practices (praxis) of urban sustainability and urban environmental justice. The course examines environmental policy, processes, and issues, and in particular, community-based engagement, through an exploration of natural spaces and places of nature in Scarborough.
Area of focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; Urban Sustainability
How do gender relations shape different spaces? We will explore how feminist geographers have approached these questions from a variety of scales - from the home, to the body, to the classroom, to the city, to the nation, drawing on the work of feminist geographers.
Area of focus: People, Place and Power; Urban Sustainability
This course explores the connections between health, sexuality, and social inequalities. It begins by examining the socially constructed nature of sexuality and how this varies across time and place. Subsequent themes include masculinities and health, histories of love, reproductive health, and transnational relationships and health. Examples will be taken from a variety of countries, including in the global South, and special attention will be given to HIV/AIDS.
Area of focus: People, Place and Power
Designed for final-year Human Geography Majors, this seminar is devoted to analysis and discussion of current theoretical and methodological issues in human geography. This course is an unique opportunity to explore a particular topic in-depth, the specific content will vary from year to year. Seminar format with active student participation.
This course focuses on the practice of ethnography in geographic research and allows students to design and conduct their own ethnographic research projects. Utilizing various approaches in geographic scholarship, in the first part of the course students will learn about ethnographic research methods and methodologies and finalize their research proposals. In the second part, they will carry out their research under the supervision of the course director and with support from their peers. Course assignments will assist each student throughout their research design, ethics approval, ethnography, and writing a final paper. Course meetings will be conducted in a seminar format.
Examines links between politics of difference, social justice and cities. Covers theories of social justice and difference with a particular emphasis placed on understanding how contemporary capitalism exacerbates urban inequalities and how urban struggles such as Occupy Wall Street seek to address discontents of urban dispossession. Examples of urban social struggles will be drawn from global North and South.
Areas of focus: Urban Sustainability
How do sex and gender norms take and shape place? To examine this question, we will explore selected queer and trans scholarship, with a particular emphasis on queer scholars of colour and queer postcolonial literatures. Course topics include LGBTQ2S lives and movements, cities and sexualities, cross-border migration flows, reproductive justice, and policing and incarceration.
Area of Focus: People, Place and Power
As major engines of the global economy, cities are also concentrated sites of work and employment. Popular and political understandings about what constitutes "fair" and "decent" work, meanwhile, are currently facing profound challenges. From the rise of platformed gig work to the rising cost of living in many cities – this course introduces students to approaches within Geography that help to conceptualize what "work" is, and to major forces shaping the laboured landscapes of cities, with a focus on the Greater Toronto Area. In this course students will get the opportunity to explore the varied forms of production and reproduction that make the GTA function and thrive, and to develop a vocabulary and critical lens to identify the geographies of different kinds of work and employment relations. Students will also have the chance to develop labour market research skills, and to critically examine the forms of work they themselves undertake every day.
Area of Focus: Urban Sustainability
Designed for final-year Human Geography Majors, this seminar is devoted to analysis and discussion of current theoretical and methodological issues in urban geography. Specific content will vary from year to year. Seminar format with active student participation.
Area of focus: Urban Sustainability
Students will design, manage and complete a research project using GIS. Students will work in teams of 4-6 to pose a research question, acquire a dataset, and organize and analyze the data to answer their question. The course will teach research design, project management, data analysis, team work, and presentation of final results.
Independent research extension to one of the courses already completed in Human Geography. Enrolment requires written permission from a faculty supervisor and the Associate Chair, Human Geography. Only open to students who have completed 13.0 credits and who are enrolled in the Specialist and Major Program in Human Geography, Major Program in Physical and Human Geography, or Minor Program in GIS sponsored by the Department of Human Geography.
New approaches within geography challenge ontological divisions between humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, viewing entities and their relations as interconnected. But relational thinking is not new. Students will consider Indigenous, Black, and Feminist scholarship that centres connectedness; rethinks social hierarchies of being, agency, and worth; and activates alternate worldmaking possibilities.
In everyday life, we tend to equate land with property. This course excavates this assumption by exploring regimes of property and the alternative epistemologies of land and livelihood that they displace, looking at colonialism, contests over urban space, geopolitical conflict, and how we might realize more just land relations.
Areas of focus: Nature, Society and Environmental Change; People, Place and Power
Whether corporate, not for profit or governmental, modern organizations require leaders who are willing to take on complex challenges and work with a global community. Effective leaders must learn how to consider and recognize diverse motivations, behaviours, and perspectives across teams and networks. Building upon content learned in GLB201H5 and focusing on applications and real-life case studies; this course will provide students with knowledge and skills to become global leaders of the future. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to adapt culturally sensitive communication, motivation and negotiation techniques, preparing them to apply new principled, inclusive, and appreciative approaches to the practice of global leadership. In preparation for GLB401Y1, this course will include group-based activities in which students collaborate on current issues of global importance. An experiential learning component will help develop skills through interactions with guest lecturers and community partners. Community partners will present real-world global leadership problems to the class, which students will work to analyze and solve. At the end of the term, students will meet in person for final group presentations to deliver key solutions to community partners. This course will be delivered primarily online through synchronous/asynchronous delivery, with specific in-person activities scheduled throughout the course.