The Cities doctoral research programme offers an excellent environment for innovative and interdisciplinary graduate research on cities, space and urbanism. Students come to the MPhil/PhD Cities from a range of academic and professional backgrounds, sharing an interest in linking the social and physical study of urban issues.
The doctoral programme includes training in research design, practice and presentation in the first year, together with a dedicated ongoing Research Seminar on Cities and Space for students at all year levels, and a range of student-led and international collaborations and initiatives, including the publication citiesLAB (see under Contents) and Writing Cities - see below.
|Dr Suzanne Hall's new book City Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary (Routledge) came out in April 2012. Based on her work on London's Walworth Road for her PhD thesis (Cities Programme 2009) it asks: 'How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don’t know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city’s public parts, allowing us a view of the very ordinary practices of life and livelihoods.' For more information click on image left for publisher's webpage.
Current PhD student Adam Kaasa gave two lectures at the 9th Architecture Biennial in Sao Paulo and one at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba on the work of LSE Cities’ Urban Age Programme, and on a new international research project bridging urban practitioners and the performing arts called ‘Theatrum Mundi’. He published ‘The Importance of Being Seen’, an article on surrealism, psychoanalysis and modern architecture in Mexico in the new critical cultural magazine All That Is Common.
Olivia Muñoz-Rojas’s book Ashes and Granite: Destruction and Reconstruction in the 
Spanish Civil War and Its Aftermath came out in June 2011. Based on her PhD dissertation (Cities/Sociology 2009), it is published by Sussex Academic Press in collaboration with the LSE Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.
Olivia's essay ‘Metonyms, metaphors, cities and the city’ (‘Metonimias, metáforas, ciudades y ciudad’) was awarded the 2011 Fermín Caballero Prize by the regional Association of Sociology of Castilla La Mancha (ACMS) (Spain).
For more information about our current PhD students and those who recently completed their doctorate here, please see our PhD students and Previous PhD students pages.
Writing Cities
|Writing Cities is an annual collaboration between research students at the Cities Programme at LSE, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, MIT Media LAB, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Harvard Law School. This year's conference was held in Cambridge, MA from 10-12 May 2012, on the theme 'Limits' - see Writing Cities|.
Click on image right to read Writing Cities 1: 'How do views shape words: How do words shape cities?' (eds. Hall, Suzanne, Fernández Arrigoitía, Melissa and Dinardi, Cecilia, LSE, 2010). (PDF).
Writing Cities 2: 'Distance and Cities: Where do we stand?' (eds. Gassner, Gunter, Kaasa, Adam and Robinson, Katherine, LSE, 2012) is now available to read as a PDF, click on image below:
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Erasmus scheme
Research students can spend up to 6 months at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. All LSE students, regardless of nationality, are eligible for an Erasmus grant| for the duration of their stay abroad, provided they have not received an Erasmus grant before. The value of the grant is EUR 225/month with a minimum stay of 3 months. For further information, please contact erasmus@lse.ac.uk|.
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