Sustainable Development of Cities and Local Communities

Objectives:

The course focuses on challenges and opportunities for sustainable development of cities and local communities. It provides insights into key human geographical theoretical perspectives, and provides competence on how to apply these perspectives on cities, urbanization and sustainable urban development.

Content:

More than half of the world's population now lives in cities. This poses a range of social and environmental challenges for citizens, planners and policy makers. Cities can contribute to sustainable development - but this depends on how they are built and governed. The course examines how global, national and local processes shape cities and communities, and how urban actors can manage the challenges these processes bring. What makes some urban spaces more liveable and sustainable than others? The course takes a human geographical perspective, examining urban change from street level to the global scale. In this way, the students will become familiar with urban change as it relates to planning, citizen action, environment, climate and migration. Through examples given in lectures, students will be acquainted with concrete policies and solutions cities are implementing. They will also learn to adopt systemic, theoretical and critical perspectives on these policies and solutions.

The course is organised conjointly with GEO224. While GEO224 has a component offered in Norwegian on Norwegian planning systems, GEO223 has added content offered in English on migration and urbanisation in a globalised world. 

On completion of the course the student should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

The student...

• Can provide a basic overview of some central human geographical approaches to urbanization, planning and sustainability.
• Can outline and discuss processes of change at different scales and the forces of change in places.
• Can discuss contemporary challenges for the sustainability of cities and communities
• Can critically discuss various policies and solutions for advancing sustainable cities

Skills

The student...

• Can make use of lessons from the course in group discussions.
• Can write an essay referring to relevant literature, discussing societal challenges from multiple perspectives
• Is able to use relevant theory in the analysis of empirical cases.

General competence

The student...

• Has acquired theoretical knowledge and insight on urbanization, planning and sustainability issues, and can apply place, space and scale as concepts to analyze society.