Learner Reviews & Feedback for Greening the Economy: Sustainable Cities by Lund University

I took this course after taking few other courses in sustainability field on Coursera. In my honest opinion, the net learning at the end is minimal. There are various actors involved from Lund university, WWF etc. but it lacks an overall approach in a planned way. All lectures seems fragmented with no connection among them. While everyone agrees cities are important for global sustainability, there is a lack of proper solutions on how to do that. Few common sentences which repeats 100 times are: cities are important as more people are going to live here, all actors including govt and pvt needs to be involved, bicycling is key to manage mobility etc. If you ask me I will say go for The age of sustainable development course and then Global Environment management.

Great beginner course, I would love to see an intermediate to advanced level course further explaining some of the specific subject matter more in depth. Fantastic work putting this together!

The course was interisting and ideal if it's your first approach with the topic of sustainable cities. I do appreciated the class about sharing economy, I found it inspiring and down-to-earth at the same time. However, sometimes the course repeat itself during the weeks. Most of the classes are too introductory and they didn't dig enough deep to give some more insight (not necessarily technical). Finally, be aware of your "bubble": many examples come the north of Europe where cities are working toward sustainability even before the climate crisis we're facing nowadays. In other part of the World, even in Europe itself, it isn't easy implement sustainable strategies and it would have been useful more winning examples about it.

Excellent Course. It helped me a a lot in preparing my research proposal for Master Studies in City and Regional Planning.

The Course was very enjoyable and interesting. I have learned alot and motivated to undertake similar courses.

This course is a bunch of overlapping, wannabe TED talk-style videos full of hippie waffle. There is very little actual content, poor structure, and you can save time and pass the quizzes using google. I really struggle to understand how this got 4.6 out of 5 on Coursera. Fake reviews?

This course is amazing. It contains so much information and practical examples. The instructors are really good. I love listening to their lectures. This course is an excellent addition to my degree. Thank You all the Professor's and Lund University for publishing this course on Coursera.

I believe that it is crucial that more citizens take courses on these issues to help our global goal of a sustainable future. This specific course highlights a lot of ways on which we can do so.

This course is an interesting introduction into sustainable initiatives and policy implementation within cities. The structure of a short quiz after each week encouraged me to take detailed notes on the readings and lectures, and I enjoyed conducting my own research for the coursework.

Some of the readings are from several years ago and do not necessarily represent the most up to date information. It would also have been interesting to hear about more projects outside of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, as many of the case studies seemed to focus on these areas.

This is an ok introductory course, a compilation of concepts, related to sustainable cities. Mentiones a list of places where one or another practice is implemented. Some educational clips look like they are taken from Youtube or like promo videos for a certain initiative. Some of the "lecturers" are just phd students, introducing their research topics. No step-by-step examples of developed cases are shown.

I was somewhat disappointed with the content of this course. It seems shallow and disintegrated to me. Its difficult to say that this course provides some practical knowledge.

Overall I have to agree that this course was repetitive and provided no real substance. I feel like i could have learned a lot more. However, I will say that it was a good introductory class. I learned new concepts and definitions. After taking this course, I definitely feel inspired to pursue a masters in city planning. This course is great if u want to get a little taste of urban planning.

Really interesting course. I recommend it for all people who want to now how are cities need to act for sustainable development of our cities, how to prevent earth from fast increasing c02 footprint.

A very exciting Course. I am delighted I was able to complete this course. It provides a broader understanding of urban spaces. I suggest this course for everyone.

Very insightful and helpful to understand environmental and energy and how these two aspects interact with urbanization.

很棒的课程~从里面了解到很多国际上前沿的可持续城市规划理念和方案~也了解到当前在技术和规划管理层面上的主流热点和发展趋势。对于一个初学者而言也显得特别友好~一点都不晦涩难懂~特别接地气~课程也比较短~氛围也比较轻松~推荐~

If you're looking for specific information about particular green technologies or methodologies, this class is not for you.

What you will get instead is largely a number of polished marketing videos of bureaucrats describing how great their future projects will be and how they're going to make such a difference in their local communities alongside a healthy dose of cheerleading for WWF and ICLEI without those organizations making any significant contributions to the educational video content. There was an ICLEI video in Week 1 that was 45 seconds of a man talking about how he'd partnered with ICLEI for an urban agriculture project. He did not describe the project any further than that, nor did he describe any of the following: budget, methodology, proposed time frame, or details of how it would mitigate the effects of climate change. You could imagine this would be frustrating for someone who had interest in urban agriculture and wanted to know more about it.

Many of the videos have varying degrees of overlap or redundancies in their content. For example, Week 3 is about Urban Living Labs. There are four videos in a row which describe what Urban Living Labs are, resulting in almost 40 minutes of borderline identical content that could have been covered solely by the third video "Urban Innovation and Living Labs". The video production quality is good on almost everything but the lengthier lecture videos, which ended up being the most useful in terms of transferring information to the viewer. I would be willing to bet that these lectures (and more) can be found on YouTube, thereby obviating the need for this course.

This class is functionally a pretty, but vapid hippie girl and therefore useless to anyone who doesn't need to be proselytized to and simply wants to have a greater understanding of these technologies and methodologies.

The plus points: The videos are very attractive with sounds and voices. With immense music and photographs it kept me seated despite long hours. Loved the way the chances for reviewing my assignments were given. I could keep learning and trying to do better.

Not so negative points: There could be some illustrations to show how cities adapted all those technologies step-by-step. Agree that Sweden has taken so much effort to bring the city to what it is now. But how did they start and ended with so beautiful city. Taking India as an example, it will be a challenging task. Reading materials are extensive. Time and energy are limited in this world of busy and hectic work atmosphere. So I think video helps a lot to reduce entire amount of reading into summary in speech.

Overall it was a superb experience.

Thank you team, Instructors, Teachers and those who have put up so much hard work in making this course.

Excellent presentations, informative and timely. I was challenged by several of the readings and quizzes. (I am 78 years old and haven't been in school for a long time.) I thought that the reading, "Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities" was particularly insightful. Some day cities in the US will also be rewarded for innovative climate actions, for now we can only envy and hope to emulate the outstanding progress made in Europe, Asia and Canada. A question: can we really achieve our climate goals without major commitments on the part of national governments? This outstanding course will encourage people of all ages to get involved in this critical issue and presents so many ways to get involved. (Robert Stein, AICP)

A fun course, however there were some redundancies amongst the speakers which ofcourse is fine, however, it would have made more sense if they could have mentioned these redundancies with the purpose of getting a higher understanding of the relations between the different topics and getting a more holistic view of all these elements. I do understand this was attempted to be solved with talks of Kes, however, I felt this was a bit shortcoming as it was just in the beginnen of the vids. Secondly there are some big things happening in city sustainability e.g. emission monitoring using the global reporting initiative. How does this relate to these topics adressed in this course?

I really liked so much this course. For me it was one of the best courses I have made because It opens my mind and perspective of what kind of cities we will built and we are bulding right now. I'm so happy to have been taken this course from Lund University. Every lesson with real examples. I hope travel and go to some smart cities and sustainable cities in Sweden soon.

This is a good complement for my career as an architect. Where I come from cities and lifestyle are very diffrent. But we live on the same world and we have the same goal about climate change.

Thank you so much for all team Coursera and Lund University!!

I took this course because I wanted to elevate the thinking and opinions I had on climate change and what we can do about it. I participate in community projects but felt helpless in the bigger picture sense. This course has helped me to understand how cities can make a real difference, what kind of projects are underway and how to go about thinking of environmental issues such as consumption, waste, resilience and resource use. I see how they are tied together now and I see how collaboration is the only way we will mitigate climate change and its effects on humanity.

The course opened my eyes on the situation with rapidly growing consequences of our actions. In many places people rarely think of the climate change, CO2 footprint and how it impacts the nature. We need to take the responsibility on that. The course showed just how scientists, universities and ordinary caring people try to address the climate change in cities, where the most effect on nature takes place. The number of solutions are presented in the course and explained well. I definitely recommend the course.

The course was very interesting and I learned a lot. It opened new doors to the sustainability urban planning, smart and sustainable cities, and green economy for me. A big advantage was the wonderful examples of practices done in various cities across the globe based on course topics, presented with wonderful documentaries. The language, course readings, examples, and everything about it was very well constructed and presented. I suggest it to anyone interested in sustainability and urban development.

Greetings! Enjoyed the course very much.Lecture videos,reading instructions,assignment submission with rubrics.Also documentary videos taking live example of cities from Europe and other regions, is really worth watching.How action plans among various stakeholders are happening is really worthy. Test assessments and as well peer assessments enjoyed joyfully.Wish Lund University and team members all the very best! in many more Endeavor’s

Thank you Shall join some other course in time to go.