Shaping urban futures: New Peak Urban open access online course

Shaping Urban Futures (SUF) will enable learners to imagine how they can make a difference to the future cities that will shape tomorrow's planet. With the majority of the world's population predicted to be living in cities by 2050, overcoming the challenges associated with rapid urbanisation will be a major factor in worldwide sustainable development outcomes in the years to come. SUF focuses on many of those challenges.
 

SUF draws on four years of research by more than 100 researchers within the multidisciplinary, UKRI-funded research programme PEAK Urban in which five global institutions collaborated: The African Centre for Cities, Universidad EAFIT, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, University of Oxford and Peking University. The Transport Studies Unit (TSU) was one of the research centres at the University of Oxford that participated in PEAK-Urban.

SUF is relevant for both urban scholars and professionals across government, corporate, social and non-profit sectors. The course draws on new urban sciences combined with insights from social sciences and humanities to intervene in shaping the urban future.

This self-paced online course is designed to help learners to:

• Recognise the new urban sciences that are driving our understanding of urbanisation across the world
• Examine carefully how we should understand new methods to trace, examine and explore processes of emergence in the city
• Visualise how technological change is adopted, adapted and deployed differently in variable city contexts
• Share urban experiences and contribute to the coproduction of knowledge to enrich and strengthen knowledge exchange in cities

Learn more about Shaping Urban Future on Coursera