All Things Urban

In our rapidly changing and contested global environment, cities are becoming increasingly important: they house a majority of the world’s inhabitants and act as catalysts of social, political, economic, cultural, and ecological change. The Master in Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel offers a pedagogical platform for understanding these planetary transformations. The program expands the study of the urban by examining today’s social struggles and global conflicts in relation to the legacies of empire and alternative practices of world-making and knowledge production. It starts from the premise that the world’s urban and environmental challenges call for new ways of thinking as well as doing. Imagining alternative futures means rethinking the present—its historical making, its political unfolding, and the ways in which it is made sensible. The Master in Critical Urbanisms is an English-taught four-semester program that trains a new generation of graduates to think and act beyond divisions of urban versus rural and North versus South in order to address the complexity of urban lifeworlds in the twenty-first century. The program is supported by an internationally recognized faculty who work on and with cities and territories from a global perspective. The curriculum trains students to develop theoretical and practical competencies, oriented toward both scholarly and public platforms. This combination is essential to address the extraordinarily complex imperatives of urbanization in the twenty-first century. TWO TRADEMARK ELEMENTS: 1) Interdisciplinary urban research that combines humanities and social science methods with creative practice and visual representation. Drawing from the disciplines of architecture, geography, history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, the curriculum provides students with a unique grounding in urban research. 2) Immersive learning in dynamic urban contexts, with the choice between a semester of study and research on urbanisms from the Global South, which takes place at the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town, or a semester of study and multi-sited research exploring urban processes that work across North/South geographies.

The University of Basel, founded in 1460, is the oldest university in Switzerland. As a research-intensive university it offers Swiss and international students a broad range of degree programmes and excellent conditions for studying at the bachelors, masters, and doctoral level.

A scholarship is available, click "Register" to find out more.