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I guess I can give my review on this class now !
For me I found half the class interesting, and half the class boring/dry. We talked about the history of urbanization in Canada and the US, residential urbanization, urban planning, and some other small topics. I found that there was a lot on the history of urb, which I found really dry (but that could be because I don't like history!). I really enjoyed the residential parts because we talked about social aspects to why people live in certain places (like poor people live in slums, rich people live in suburbs blah blah).
The professor was Dr Wilton, he was really good and seemed very educated and passionate about urban geography.
The mark breakdown was 15% midterm, 20% group assignment, 20% individual assignment, 5% participation, 40% exam.
The midterm seemed really hard to me (but that was because it was the stuff I found boring/I had another midterm the day before - if you study a lot it may not be hard). It was like 30-40 short answer questions worth like 1-4 marks each. The class avg wasnt thatttt great, but I don't think many people knew what to expect.
For the group assignment, you get with like 4-5 people (we got to pick our groups) and you had a list of countries to pick and you had to compare them to north american countries - ex: we did Buenos Aires compared to North America, and we focused on economy, population, history, environmental problems, and geography/layout of the city - and the similarities and differences between the city/NA. It was pretty easy to get a good mark as long as you put in some effort.
For the second individual assignment, you had to do an interview with an adult about their experiences moving from one city to another. You then had to write an essay, explaining their experience, then explaining how that agrees/disagrees with what youve learned in class so far. It really wasn't that hard and it was interesting to see how a parent or friend had experienced what youve talked about in class.
Lab participation was 5%, but you didn't really have to participate you just had to go. Labs were mainly used for time to work on assignments.
The exam seemed much easier than the midterm, and it wasn't cumulative (it was like end of january-end of march). It was pick 3 out of 6 long answers (worth like 8 marks each), then pick 10 out of 12 short answers (worth 2-4 marks each) and like 14 1 word answers worth 1 mark each. If you study it shouldn't be that hard !
Overall I enjoyed the class; in third year you can kind of specialize in urbanization classes (like residential geography, or urban historical geography) so if there are parts of the class that you like a lot more than other parts, you can focus on that in third year !
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