TEACHING
I teach at both undergraduate and graduate levels and my classes attract a multidisciplinary group of students across the campus. My teaching covers the following: planning theory, international and community development; sociocultural formation of cities; grassroots strategies and urban movements; global inequalities, migration, and transnational urbanism; urban governance and the reconfigured state-society relations for provision of infrastructure, basic services, and housing. ​Upon invitation I also teach intensive short courses at international institutions (e.g. University of Basel, Switzerland; Universidade Federal do Parana, Brazil).​​
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Below are listed the courses taught at University of Illinois:
Introduction to the process of urbanization from a global perspective by exploring the social, political, cultural and economic forces that shape urban life. Students will learn to analyze urban development in a range of cities including those in the Middle East and South Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Introduces students to the main theoretical frameworks and conceptual building blocks of urban and community development in the Global South. It helps students to develop critical grassroots focused understanding of the approaches to development planning, the notion of community participation and empowerment, and the role of various actors including the non-government organizations and the community-based groups.
Recent advances in planning, policy-making and decision-making theories as they relate to the efficient use of land and to the complex interrelationships among the major uses of land, i.e., housing, transportation, agriculture; specific applications vary annually, reflecting the students' dissertation research topics. Prerequisite: UP 501 or consent of instructor. See syllabus.
Strives to help students develop analytical and practical skills to understand how plans are made as a negotiated process and practice. This course recognizes and pays special attention to a varied range of actors and interest groups who shape plans, in their process and outcome, through invited and invented spaces of action. As such, the course is about plan making not only as a formal process by professionals, but also by a range of actors including artists, activists, and residents through informal as well as insurgent practices.
The content of this seminar has changes frequently to cover timely concerns to transnational planning, including: Globalization and Planning, Urban Management and Governance, State Decentralization, Globalization and Urban Inequalities; Transnational Urbanism; Cities and Citizenship; and Migration and Development; Displacement and Global Inequalities
Digital Storytelling explores how storytelling can play a central role in planning education and practice by democratizing knowledge, sharpening critical judgement, and expanding our practical tools. This course, by exploring other mediums of communication, seeks to move beyond the hegemony of textual communication and introduce means that might further democratize both production and dissemination of knowledge. In this course we offer a range of digital communication tools (eg by podcast, video, info graph and storymap) that are critical to inclusive planning and education. See syllabus.