Description: This course is designed to acquaint students with the key principles of sustainable urban health and to identify the relationships between health, urban planning and development approaches using real-world examples. Students will develop their own solutions to a real-world problem in support of urban health tools.Specifically, the course is based on a healthy urban development scenario for the “Weberplatz“ in the City of Essen. The “Weberplatz “and its surrounding in the City Nord are often abundant and not very popular for people to gather or walk by. Although this public open space has a lot to offer and is close to the University Campus Essen, it is not clear why visitors are missing – especially students.
Your task is to discover the underlying problems by analyzing the public open space and its surrounding. You are expected to find solutions and develop own concepts that make the place more attractive for students. Identifying the possible reasons for abandonment of the square will be coupled with developing the solutions based on the healthy urban development approach. Furthermore, your task will be to assess your solutions by using the Healthy Urban Development Checklist (HUD). By the end of the course you are expected to present your solutions to the problem by integrating different tools and methods. There is an expanding range of tools that can be used to plan, develop and propose interventions and which can change the urban environment to create better opportunities for health.
The working steps to develop the theoretical concept include:
1) to address a given healthy urban development scenario starting with identifying problem (e.g. few interviews with students in Campus Essen or residents, buffer analysis, or similar)
2) to analyze proposed solutions with help of already existing tools (HUD Checklist)
3) to discuss urban health in regard to developed solutions
Throughout the working steps, students will be guided and accompanied by our interdisciplinary teaching team.
Learning objectives: This course makes students familiar with the main concepts of urban health and tools and methods for healthy urban development. The aim of this course is to enable students to develop own ideas and innovative concepts for urban health by applying the Healthy Urban Development (HUD) Checklist. Upon completion of the course, students will have enhanced knowledge and understanding of
- key principles which promote health and wellbeing in public open spaces
- tools used for urban health and public open space assessment
- presenting problems and developing solutions
- development of own ideas and innovative concepts related to urban health
Format: The course will be a combination of classical lectures, self-study, individual or group work (depending on the final number of participants). This will be a compact and intense seminar, which will require a lot of self-study and preparation after lectures.
Assessment: At the end of the course you are expected to present a poster (10 minutes) and exam questions about the course contents. Duration of the oral exam is 30 minutes.
The examinations will take place on 26th Feb 2019. Further details of time and location will follow at beginning of the course. |
