This self-paced course on the future of cities incorporates research outputs from China, Colombia, India, South Africa, and the UK. It is designed for urban scholars and practitioners who want to work more rigorously across the theory–practice divide. If we are to make sense of the future of humanity, we must first understand the future of the city. The consequences of rapid, unplanned urbanisation—such as growing inequality, climate change, and inadequate infrastructure—cannot be addressed from within a single discipline, or a single national context. Shaping Urban Futures: Working across Theory and Practice builds upon this premise, drawing on the work of a five-year programme known as PEAK Urban—a collaboration between the African Centre for Cities, Universidad EAFIT, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, University of Oxford, and Peking University. Across six modules, the course addresses the interrelated challenges of urbanisation through comparative cases from the Global South, examining how informality and livelihoods, environment and public health, and big data and technology intersect to shape cities—and what these intersections might mean for urban futures. You should enrol, if you are: • An urban scholar, with any degree of experience—from early career researchers to veteran urbanists • An architect, planner, or urban designer • A development practitioner working with NGOs, the government, or international organisations • A corporate professional working on urban issues Why you should enrol: This course can help you develop your own methods and frames to view, interpret, and define urban changes in your local geography and context. By the end of this course, you will: • Recognise the new urban sciences driving the understanding of urbanisation across the world • Develop your own lens to examine how social, economic and environmental changes emerge and reshape the working of a city • Be able to visualise how technological change is adopted, adapted and deployed across different urban contexts • Understand how to help shape urban futures through knowledge co-production and exchange
MO
I learned a lot from the lectures and reading materials. This course is very helpful in my graduate studies class.
AS
exciting and thought-provoking course for anyone who is interested in Urban planning and wants a glimpse of its future and best practices.
PP
A must introductory course for all the planners, researchers and urbanists.
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Shaping Urban Future is correctly order course in urban challenge and complexities across global world. The course has insight and fine line of understanding the urban future with academic experts.
A must introductory course for all the planners, researchers and urbanists.
As an urban researcher, this course empowers and broadens knowledge for how the global has faced modern challenges and how researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and communities are dealing with massive amounts of data. Thank you for the urban PEAK project for sharing this valuable research online for many other researchers and urban planners from around the world to be able to access such meaningful lessons.
It was a great knowledge resource about the urban planning tools, challenges and practices in the global south. Moreover, knowing about PEAK project with its interdisciplinary and intercultural researchers, and how they deal with different urban contexts, was a impressive.
Amazing course! Very interesting to attempt the quizzes and study the reading material as well. Helped me develop a deep interest in economic development for urban planning. As a BA Economics Student, this has fascinated me!
The course design gave a great overview of new urban sciences and its applicability for the future, with good grounding of perspectives. The instructors and content were also compelling. Very much recommend this course!
exciting and thought-provoking course for anyone who is interested in Urban planning and wants a glimpse of its future and best practices.
I learned a lot from the lectures and reading materials. This course is very helpful in my graduate studies class.
Really insightful! Thanks
well designed course
Very insightful
great course
thank ypo
good
Some weeks of the course offer very specific, useful knowledge about the topic, but overall, most of what you learn can be easily found in a typical economics course. The truly distinctive content mainly comes from fields that are not directly related to economics. You can certainly learn many useful and interesting things from the course, but you need to be very patient and focused. It would be much better, and highly appreciated, if the instructors presented the material in a more engaging way.