This course focuses on the physical and economic renewal of urban neighborhood Main Streets by combining classroom work with an applied class project. The course content covers four broad areas:

An overview of the causes for urban business district decline, the challenges faced in revitalization and the type of revitalization strategies employed;
The physical and economic development planning tools used to understand and assess urban Main Streets from physical design and economic development perspectives;
The policies, interventions, and investments used to foster urban commercial revitalization; and
The formulation of a revitalization plan for an urban commercial district.

Explore the key governance challenges for smart sustainable city (SSC) initiatives and the approach required. Learn to organize co-creation and to use a roadmap that support planning, implementation, close monitoring and risks mitigation.

Urban planners, policy makers and managers have an important role in making cities and communities more sustainable and resilient by incentivizing and developing smart solutions. Medellín in Colombia is a good example of how effective governance and cooperation with citizens led to the remake of the city and transformed it to a safer environment with a thriving economy. But how can those initiatives be sustained and governed? How can we deal with the challenges along the way, like effective stakeholders’ engagement, conflicting interests, decision-making under deep uncertainty, interdependent problems, spatial justice, and the transformation towards a digital society? To sum it up: building smart sustainable cities initiatives requires a strong governance capacity and new approaches!

This course will:

- provide the principles for incentivising, planning, developing and managing sustainable smart city initiatives
- present an overview of the drivers and barriers for SSC development
- present sustainability challenges and tools for SSC development
- show practical recommendations to strengthen SSC governance capacity
- introduce a smart city governance roadmap
- explain the conditions for effective stakeholder engagement and ways to organize co-creation pathways
- clarify the regulatory and legal framework for SSC including privacy and cybersecurity issues
- describe the conditions to implement digital innovation that benefit citizens including data governance
- show the importance of close monitoring and assessing SSC projects including data reliability and algorithms
- equip you with knowledge and learnings from case studies from various projects that were carried out in Latin America, next to familiarizing you with common challenges that arise in the process. These cases range from urban transportation to participatory budgeting, safety and waste management applications, but always making the connection with the governance and sustainability aspects.

The course will be moderated in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

This MOOC is a spin-off of the EU-funded Cap4City project.

This course has been developed, and will be delivered by experts in the field of Smart Sustainable Cities from twelve different universities in Latin America and Europe. You will find more information on the instructors while you navigate the course.

This advanced lesson plan introduces vocabulary related to pollution, poverty and other issues found in urban settings. It provides plenty of thought-provoking questions to get your students talking and engaged with the material.If you want additional lesson plans and support, including teachers’ notes, be sure to register for a free Off2Class account.

Learning about sustainability requires systems-thinking and a curiosity to explore. In the COVID-19 edition of a sustainability course, there were many chances to create new learning opportunities not only from the course content, but also from the world around us, the media and news, and from each other.Students in the course CIVE230: Engineering and Sustainable Development were tasked with making a contribution to sustainability efforts. They have been hard at work throughout the term to share a sustainability idea that were compiled in an e-book “The Sustainability Contribution Project” which showcases their ideas that cover all course topics as they apply to cities around the world. This activity encouraged students to explore sustainable cities, infrastructure, solutions and technologies globally to generate an enriched learning experience and create an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning. Together, they co-created content.This e-book serves as a contribution by the class for the class, and for the wider engineering education community. I encourage you to have a look through. 

This course covers theories about the form that settlements should take and attempts a distinction between descriptive and normative theory by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. Case studies will highlight the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. Through examples and historical context, current issues of city form in relation to city-making, social structure, and physical design will also be discussed and analyzed.

“Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”    -Jane Jacobs
This course examines the challenges that cities will face and strategies they can use to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Particular attention will be paid to the presence of global disparities, the needs of vulnerable populations and resource constrained locales, and the ways in which local government and community-based activities can achieve equitable levels of climate-readiness.

“Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”    -Jane Jacobs
This course examines the challenges that cities will face and strategies they can use to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Particular attention will be paid to the presence of global disparities, the needs of vulnerable populations and resource constrained locales, and the ways in which local government and community-based activities can achieve equitable levels of climate-readiness.

The lectures will discuss characteristics of urban water flows, hydraulics, hydrology and how to apply knowledge of these phenomena to the design and analysis of urban water systems. Integration of various scientific disciplines and technological and practical approaches is a central theme in this course.

Students will design an urban drainage system for a real case in the Netherlands or abroad using the Rational Method. They will use this design as input for a hydrodynamic computer model and perform model calculations for various conditions to check the performance of the designed system and improve where needed. They will prepare a written report of their data, design choices and results and present main results in a plenary session that concludes the lecture series.

Students will collect their own data on urban heat in order to understand how different city design choices change temperatures.

This list presents a basic set of vocabulary words that deal with categories of travel and places, including travel and tourism, as well as nouns and verbs relevant to urban spaces, such as roads and airports.

The majority of words contained within the website are nouns, and some verbs are interspersed. The words and verbs are presented in both modern standard and colloquial Egypt, and feature Arabic text and transliteration.

Master course on design and planning of the urban water management system. It deals with fluxes and processes in water and soil. Furthermore, aspects of water management policy development are discussed.

This lesson has students investigate how albedo is contributing to temperature increasing in some places, like cities, are increasing at faster rates than elsewhere.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Access to clean drinking water is widely considered a fundamental human right But many people, especially those living in urban settings and market economies, face water insecurity, borne of political and economic inequality Water sharing – defined as the exchange of water among households – is so widespread that is could be regarded as a grassroots practice to ensure a human right to water Despite its clear importance, however, there’s been little research into the practice New research in WIREs Water aims to fill this void This global study highlights a number of factors that appear to shape who shares water with whom, and why Researchers found that water sharing offers insight into the everyday and, at times, invisible ties that bind people and households to one another Water sharing isn’t simply a fleeting charitable impulse – the practice depends on specific livelihood strategies, spiritual beliefs and cost/benefit calculations For example, many cultures have complex institution.."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Access to clean drinking water is widely considered a fundamental human right But many people, especially those living in urban settings and market economies, face water insecurity, borne of political and economic inequality Water sharing – defined as the exchange of water among households – is so widespread that is could be regarded as a grassroots practice to ensure a human right to water Despite its clear importance, however, there’s been little research into the practice New research in WIREs Water aims to fill this void This global study highlights a number of factors that appear to shape who shares water with whom, and why Researchers found that water sharing offers insight into the everyday and, at times, invisible ties that bind people and households to one another Water sharing isn’t simply a fleeting charitable impulse – the practice depends on specific livelihood strategies, spiritual beliefs and cost/benefit calculations For example, many cultures have complex institution.."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.