This module will provide you with an understanding of current environmental problems and how to act upon them, with specific reference to urban and peri-urban areas. Overall, it stresses the importance of opening up the decision-making process to broad participation of all ‘stakeholders’ including organisations and federations of ‘slum’/shack dwellers and suggests a variety of means to do so.

Urban planners and development practitioners are faced with the challenges of rapid urban change, resource scarcity, environmental health and climate change. Large sections of the urban population suffer health burdens as a result of environmental hazards, especially in urban areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Much of this is linked to living and working in settlements which are regarded as informal or even illegal and often lack basic infrastructure and services. Another serious problem, especially for larger and more prosperous cities, is the extent to which urban-based production and consumption transfer environmental costs to local ecosystems and global cycles, including greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming. You will examine how human development goals such as access to safe water and sanitation can be combined with a concern for ecological sustainability in a rapidly urbanizing world.

During the first half of the module you will examine urban environmental problems in an integrated way and consider how these fit within a commitment to sustainable development. You will gain an understanding of a range of urban environmental problems at different scales and how they affect health, local ecosystems and global systems. You will assess practical experiences in identifying and acting on environmental problems and their underlying causes at the local level, focusing on issues related to water supply, sanitation and solid-waste management, environment and health and the social and spatial distribution of environmental risk. The second half of the module introduces you to the nature and scope of Urban Environmental Planning and Management (EPM) looking specifically at how to intervene for environmental justice and sustainability in the context of complexity. It focuses particularly on understanding the different actors, processes and approaches in urban EPM interventions and the extent to which they can shape future trajectories of just urban sustainabilities.

On completion of this module you will be able to:

Explain comprehensively the range of environmental problems in cities and how they affect human health, local ecosystems and global systems;
	Develop approaches for the resolution of these problems within the broader political economy of urban centres and regions and the societies within which they are located;
	Identify the current and potential role of community organisations, NGOs, governments and international agencies in addressing environmental problems in urban areas;
	Engage critically with the processes and procedures of urban EPM.
 