Urban Development Planning MSc/PG Dip

This MSc aims to equip participants to work effectively as development practitioners in urban contexts through a deeper understanding of the processes that generate urban change. The programme aims to enhance their diagnostic and strategic capacities to respond to such change within the framework of socially just urban governance.

Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits.

The programme consists of three core modules (90 credits), either one or two optional modules (30 credits) and a dissertation (60 credits).

A Postgraduate Diploma, three core modules (90 credits), one optional module (30 credits), full-time nine months, is offered.

• The City and its Relations: Context, Institutions and Actors in Urban Development Planning
• Urban Development Policy, Planning and Management: Strategic Action in Theory and Practice
• Practice in Urban Development Planning

Please note, not all optional modules may be available.

• Adapting Cities to Climate Change in the Global South
• An Introduction to Public Economics and Public Policy
• Critical Urbanism Studio I - Learning from Informality: Case studies and alternatives
• Critical Urbanism Studio II - Investigative Design Strategies for Contested Spaces
• Disaster Risk Reduction in Cities
• Food and the City
• Gender in Policy and Planning
• Housing as Urbanism: Housing Policy and the Search for Scale
• Housing Policies: Practical Dimensions and Alternative Options
• Industrialisation and Infrastructure
• Knowledge Systems and Sustainable Food Production
• Managing the City Economy
• Neo-Structuralism and the Developmental State
• NGOs and Social Transformation
• Participatory Processes: Building for Development
• Post Disaster Recovery: Policies, Practices and Alternatives
• Social Diversity, Inequality and Poverty
• Sustainable Infrastructure and Services in Development
• Urban Water and Sanitation, Planning and Politics
• Transport Equity and Urban Mobility

All MSc students submit a 10,000-word report on a topic related to the main themes of the programme. The topic can be chosen to enhance career development or for its inherent interest.

The programme is delivered through a combination of lectures, seminars, group work, workshops and field trips. Field trips so far have taken place in Egypt, Ghana, India, Thailand, and Tanzania. Student performance is assessed through essays, coursework, team project reports, written examinations, the overseas field trip and a 10,000-word dissertation.