Institutions, institutional strengthening and institutional reform are always a central part of the recommendations for better and improved urban development, planning and governance. Strong rules and regulations are deemed essential, and weak, inadequate or inexistent institutions are viewed as factors explaining failures, undesirable outcomes or poor performances. This means that the analysis of rules and regulations becomes an important and strategic exercise when studying and designing urban policy. The purpose of this course is to deal with this topic in detail, by unraveling and disentangling the various ways of understanding institutions, and constructing an operational definition of institutions that will be useful for theoretical and empirical studies of regulations in urban settlements. The course will be a combination of a graduate seminar and of a practical course: there will be discussions of key approaches, concepts, frameworks and debates concerning institutions and their application to urban settlements. And there will be a practical exercise throughout the whole semester in which the students will carry out case studies of institutional arrangements in different cities.