MPlan Planning / Course details

Each and every day there are an estimated 193,107 new urban dwellers (UN-Habitat 2009). This is equivalent to a city larger than the size of Dallas every week, the population of Rio de Janeiro just over every month or a new Russia every two years. Across the globe, the city has been overwhelmingly selected as the habitat of choice for humanity and has consequently become the nexus for an array of physical, economic, social, political and cultural capital.  So, by the middle of the twenty first century three in four of us will live in cities.  We are living in the urban age, but this is actually more than just about cities, it is about how a mode of organizing space and society is shaping the world in which almost all of us live.  Those great cities of the twentieth century – Paris, London and others – continue to grow in size, slowly but surely.  However, some of the most important changes are happening elsewhere in the world-Delhi, Karachi, Mumbai, Shanghai, São Paulo; these cities are where the action is, where population growth rates are the highest, and where the issues of producing and managing ecological, economically, and socially sustainable cities are at the most pressing.

One drawback of this concentration of people and resources has been that threats to urban citizens are amplified, and whilst cities are commonly seen as places of safety, incongruously they are also the hub of modern risks. Of course, cities are not just problems that need solutions.  Cities have always been sources of cultural creativity, conviviality, diversity, and transnational inter-connections.  And so they continue to be sources of inspiration as well as perspiration.

In this light, the course will introduce students to the challenges currently facing cities and to some of the ways academics have sought to make sense of them and policy-makers have sort to overcome them.

Blackboard based MCQ