 to see so many people joining, a few more still coming in, and prospective students, people who are interested in the subject and also some of our existing students as well, which is fantastic. So welcome all wherever you may be. My name is Tom Tanner. I'm a reader at SOAS, University of London, and I'm the director of Centre for Environment, Development and Policy. It's a research centre, but we run a major teaching programme in distance learning. I'm joined also by Annabelle de Fries, who's programme director for our Sustainable Development MSC, and I'm the director of our Climate Change and Development MSC. Is your Annabelle there? Probably muted. Hi, I'm here now. So in terms of what we're going to talk through today, so we want to basically embrace the urban and the relationship between sustainability and the urban area, and we're going to provide a bit of a background of a few key challenges that are facing cities in urban areas and processes around sustainability, and particularly around resilience, which is one of my own research interests, and we'll do that kind of baiting it on some of the elements of our new master's module that we've just launched on urban sustainability in this last session. And at the end, we'll also provide a short overview of our distance learning programmes and the way they're structured so you get an idea. So I will leave it to Annabelle. We'll talk a little bit about the sustainability issues. I'll come back and talk a bit about urban resilience and some of my work in that, and we'll give you a short overview of the programmes before a Q&A at the end, and we'll aim to keep it fairly short so we're not taking up the whole hour and precious people's time, but at least plenty of time for Q&A at the end. Please do add any questions in the chat function before then, or if you want to ask them in person, then we'll have time for that also at the end, and we can unmute your mics and we can ask in person, but otherwise as things come to you, please do stick them in a Q&A and we can try and address them together. Great, so Annabelle, I'll leave it to you to take over. I lost you there for a minute, so hi. So I am the convener of the urban sustainability programme module, so I'll just be introducing some of the key themes that we use in our module and our students are learning at the moment. I'm going to turn my camera off to make sure that we don't lose any broadband width, so it should work a bit better. So the first thing we start within our module is thinking about why urban sustainability is important, and that's what we'll start today with presentation, and then we'll go on to talking a little bit about what we mean by urban sustainability, what the challenges and key themes are, and also some sort of ideas of how solutions can be found, whether through global frameworks, local responses, and also different ways of thinking about problems. So first of all, why is urban sustainability important? Well, it's quite a cumbersome theme and it entails lots and lots of different topics, which are central to this field. It spans multiple disciplines, and we need lots of different disciplines to understand it. So it's really interesting to have lots of different people from who are distance learners because they're all coming from lots of different areas of expertise and professions. So urban sustainability really affects many, many four billion people live in urban areas, so it contains much of the global population. Therefore, if we are trying to address those big challenges such as poverty and inequality, we do need to be looking at how to improve conditions in these areas. By 2030, the figure of those living in urban areas will increase to around 68%. That's 55% of the global population. In North America and Latin America, they have the largest proportion of people living in areas with 82% and 81% respectively. And the number of mega cities is increasing by around 2030. It's estimated that 43 mega cities will exist and they're most likely to be located in developing regions. And urban areas are in the unique position of being both highly efficient and effective with regard to economic growth, job opportunities and health care and education. Yet at the same time, they're also the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and they can also be the most unsafe and unjust places to live. While much is written on the detrimental impacts of urban growth and we will cover these challenges shortly, the growth of an urban area can bring many benefits to citizens and to the economy. The association between the liberalization and GDP per capita is positive and urbanization facilitates economies of scale and agglomeration. As you can see here, cities contribute extensively to national economies. Just briefly, Latin America's largest cities contribute 4% of global GDP and across all regions, 23 mega cities generate 14% of global GDP. That was a figure from 2007. But of course, there are, despite the immense opportunities, there are some difficulties, nevertheless. People who live in urban areas tend to have higher incomes. They have more opportunities for jobs and better opportunities for health and education services. Those living in urban areas can also have higher incomes. They can also benefit from reduction in transaction costs. For example, in trade and transport, rent sharing and increases in output are diversity. Knowledge sharing and innovation have also been shown to thrive in urban areas. But of course, not everybody benefits and not every, so I'm getting lots of beats, not everybody sees the benefits of these elements, particularly in lower income countries where poor infrastructure can impede the benefits of urban growth for many. Other outcomes of urbanization are also thought to be the establishment of more democratic and more political accountability. And it has been argued that large populations in political capitals are able to put more direct physical pressure on rural elites. And the relationship between cities and better governance is an important topic for future research. But of course, there are real risks and challenges of living in urban areas and cities. More than two-thirds of the world's population lives in cities that are more unequal today than they were 20 years ago. The increasing population in cities has resulted in slum development with more than 828 million people living in city slums. They experience various deprivations and risks, including overcrowding and insufficient access to clean water for sanitation. And they often live in areas prone to flooding and landslides, as well as of forced evictions. Despite there being more job opportunities, many people make their living in the informal sector, and Africa has the highest portion of urban informal workforce, with low incomes and insecure livelihoods. Urban residents also face additional intersecting constraints. Poor housing and services such as water cause widespread disease, poor sanitation and is linked to malnutrition. In many cases, these outcomes are the result of multiple inequalities. An example here is with food and health, 40% of people living in urban areas experience moderate and severe food insecurity. Although 80% of global food is consumed in urban areas, the consumption is not equal, and we often assume that urban residents have more access to food. But actually, the reliance on markets and the need for income to purchase food means that urban dwellers are more likely to suffer from price increases and market shocks. In addition, poor residents also rely on cheap processed food, which is low in nutrients, and this has long term implications for cognitive ability and life expectancy, in particular for women and young children. And poor diet has combined with exposure to high levels of pollution and sedentary lifestyles has resulted in low birth weight of urban babies. An example from urban Pakistan shows that 35% of babies are low in birth weight due to undernourished and overweight pregnant women. Health is a further factor, which is impacted by air quality, which can be caused by traffic congestion, industrial emissions or poor indoor air quality. This increases conditions such as asthma and allergies and other respiratory illnesses can emerge. But none of these problems are unique to lower income countries. And one example is New York, which is one of the most unequal cities in the world with one in five New Yorkers living in poverty. Here, housing intersects with health, race and status of residents. And it's studies of on children living in high poverty households, in particular black and Latino children, are disproportionately likely to be diagnosed with asthma. A third of all asthma related emergency room visits in New York were from children from the Bronx. And climate change is particularly important in urban areas. Cities are the biggest contributors to climate change and they're also most at risk from the impacts of climate change. Heat stress and storms, extreme precipitation, coastal flooding, landslides, air pollution, drought, water scarcity and sea level rise all are some key outcomes of climate change in cities. Cities make 60% of the global energy consumption, 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of global waste. Sea level rise could put up to 800 million people at risk in more than in 570 lowline coastal cities by the year 2050. So how and in what ways can we address this? Well, you're probably most familiar with the sustainable development goals of which sustainable cities and communities is one of the key goals of goal number 11. This is the this goal plays a particular important particular focus on the importance of the human environmental health impacts of cities and also it connects with practically all of the other goals. In addition to these, to the targets which are shown here, there are also additional subcategories, sub-targets, which include the importance of linkages between the urban environment and the other wider environment as well as inclusion and integrated policy and the support for the least developed countries. Unfortunately, they have been criticised particularly the sustainable goal 11 for really failing to address the structural inequalities which are prevalent in cities and although these goals are agreed by national governments, translating them to city level decisions and plans are often very difficult, which can often have many competing and contrasting agendas. So various frameworks have been developed to assist cities and urban areas to transition towards sustainability and we cover this in our modules throughout all the different units which are all based on different aspects, for example energy and health and food systems. But these frameworks are an attempt to guide cities to trying to implement the sustainable development goal number 11 and they all tend to focus on different aspects. For example, the new urban agenda tends to focus on cooperation between levels of government and multi-stakeholder partnerships. It's very focused on strengthening urban governance, legislation and finance, whereas the urban sustainability framework prioritises governance and fiscal stability and resource efficiency from the World Bank. Finally, the climate change in cities put forward their five pathways to urban transformation, which really focuses around mitigation, adaptation and risk assessment and also focuses on disadvantaged populations and governance. Citizen action is another way that change can occur. In our module, we also provide case studies and examples of where and how local responses to urban challenges are having impacts and consider what lessons can be taken for that. One example of citizen action is the Coalition for Clean Initiative in Jakarta, but there are also others, many others, particularly from New York and Bogota, which are explored in our module. In Jakarta, several community initiatives have attempted to improve urban sustainability. The main challenges in Jakarta occur because of its location. It's in the middle of 27 rivers. Waterways and canals run all the way through Jakarta. There are canals that lead out to the Java Sea. Most of Jakarta lies below sea level, and it also has the highest pollution of Southeast Asia. This particular action was brought against the government of Jakarta and for breaching citizens' rights to a clean and healthy environment. The lawsuit was supported by petition to adopt the WHO pollution safety standards. They did eventually manage to get a response from the government, who promised to meet the demands from the lawsuit. In our module, we do look at lots of different solutions from academic work to government work and also to many different local action and responses. This leads us on to another key point in thinking about urban environments and the importance of thinking about these challenges in a systems way. One approach to this is systems thinking. This is an approach to policy analysis. It's advocated by many practitioners, in particular with regard to food systems, transport and health in cities. It also is very relevant for thinking about smart cities and how technology can interact, particularly in areas of health and transport. This diagram from by shows that the complex adaptive and open system, which is characteristic of the urban context, shows that how many different multiple actors and structures and processes are involved in many of the activities and relationships that go on within a city. The systems approach is a useful way of thinking about how we can solve problems, because in particular, it tries to seek how to understand the system as a whole, the relationship between the parts, and rather than just the parts themselves. It comes from the premise that the problems don't occur in vacuums, but are often the unintended outcomes of multiple feedback processes. In this diagram, it's really useful because it shows that cities don't just exist on their own. They're also related to rural and peri-urban areas for things like food and labour migration. That can have a real impact and have often unintended consequences with regards to things like housing and healthcare. Something like a systems approach is a very, very useful way of bringing to the fore the many different actors and perspectives, the relationships between them, and understanding where feedback loops can occur, and perhaps more importantly, where interventions can have multiple impacts in different areas. Another example of how things are interconnected is perhaps looking at the current global crisis that we have today with COVID, where we have a health crisis stemming from a food system, where changes in land use have impacted the spread of pathogens to humans, having impacts on health and education and livelihoods in cities right across the globe. And linked to all this is the need for resilience throughout the system, and an understanding of how resilience action in one area can possibly help or mitigate changes in another area, or actually result in negative consequences. So that's a little flavour of where we go with our module, and I will pass you a nice link to Tom who will then carry on talking a bit more about resilience in the urban system in relation to climate change. Thanks, Annabelle. Whoops, it really is flicky. The systems thinking approach to resilience is really taken off, although it is worth how much policy and practice still thinks of resilience in terms of this just bounce back, get back to how it was, get back to the status quo, and that's something that practitioners and theorists are fighting all the time because, you know, it's in a lot of people's interest to have things back the way they were as fast as possible, and to actually think about resilience as more about how to understand these complex dynamic systems to deal with that complexity and interactivity, particularly how to manage uncertainty and to accept that uncertainty is natural, a natural part of these urban systems, and that we need to manage it rather than obtain it and try and iron out that uncertainty. I'm using concepts like having diversity in the system, having redundancy, so things like water supply, for example, ensuring that when there is a drought, it's not just based on one reservoir, so the entire city is drinking water from one source, but there's actually a range of different sources such that if one component of a system fails, so you can use that for energy systems too, so the energy in a city, you don't want one power station to shut down the entire city, you want to have it in blocks so that you lose some parts, and you might actually have some redundancy in the system to allow that some failure, safe failure somewhere in the system. And finally, the other way that the new resilience thinking is bringing in urban areas have really brought the kind of equity and values to the fore, because resilience in terms of the kind of ecological foundations of ecological systems and are they resilient to shocks, which is where a lot of the theory comes from, and equally in engineering where resilience being about pushing something until it breaks essentially, that's not really laden with values, so if we want to include issues around equity and social justice, they need to be embedded actively rather than assuming that, and that's one of the major critiques of resilience has been that it doesn't include those values and that it does tend towards just basic bounce back. So my own research and interest and some of the work in the urban sustainability module is focused on climate change resilience, and particularly kind of disaster resilience, but also the creeping long-term threat of climate change, and it's basically on the premise that we've got a lot of people living in very exposed areas, that the migratory flows that we see are actually pushing people into, pulling people into those more exposed locations, because those cities are more dynamic, but that generally lower income migrants tend to be pushed into the more exposed locations within those cities, so you see the agglomeration of cities in coastal locations, low-lying deltas, and other areas that are really exposed to climate shocks and stresses, and we know that taking action in advance is much, much cheaper than dealing with the losses, which were 73 billion just last year, of which only 20 billion were insured, so there's a lot of loss happening there, and the recovery costs greatly outweigh the losses, and the losses greatly outweigh the costs of preventing those losses in the first place. So I've been working with a colleague, Aditya Bahadur, looking at some of this urban resilience work and examples around the world, I'm putting it into a book really in trying to kind of see where the pivot, so we're seeing where the disruption is happening to the existing patterns of risk and resilience, and suggesting kind of five key areas where major disruption is needed to improve resilience, and I'm going to touch on three of them here. The first is around data. So the normal approach to data around climate modeling, around using remote sensing techniques and surveys, suffers a series of real challenges, particularly because of the dynamism in cities. So if you think of a survey that's surveying who is in a city, first of all, does it capture the people who aren't necessarily citizens or the migrant populations, for example? Secondly, it's a snapshot in time, so how can it be more dynamic? How can it be more certain? How can the data be more granular, be more detailed, at lower scales? And how can we show that these things are true? What's the veracity of the data when we're using modeling in particular? So we've looked at a range of methods that are emerging around big data initiatives and AI that really try and tackle some of those challenges, and that we really need to look to in the future. Just a couple of examples. The use of mobile phone batteries to act as mobile temperature gauges, because the battery temperature is directly related to the air temperature, and a simple app can actually communicate that to a central grid. So you essentially got a load of moving real-time monitors of temperature, which particularly in terms, in the context of urban heat island effects and extremes, is absolutely an incredible resource that hasn't really been tapped into. We've also been looking at the Romani Huria program in Dara Salam in Tanzania, where you have a volunteer-based geographic information approach, and there's quite a lot of these kind of map-my-street type approaches where you have people who are actively adding to street map and open source software to actually improve the flood mapping of the districts in Dara Salam because the granularity that you could achieve with the remote sensing data did not actually allow the interventions to really understand where the water goes when there are different types of flood events, and to actually be able to map that on the ground so that they can better prepare for the future is really important. Bringing that data, crowdsourcing that data on the ground through these app technologies has been a real sea change in the Dara Salam flood management. One of the second big pivots we looked at is the resilience of the urban systems that Annabel's touched on already, and if you look at the existing approaches to urban services, they tend to be focused on different sectors, so it's quite a sectoral heavy focus, and things like trying to manage supply and demand. So we know that from a consumer basis we can try and improve the flows of water so that we can use water more efficiently, same for energy efficiency methods that are on the demand side. We've got a lot of work to improve the supply side as well on urban services, particularly use of things like smart grids in electricity, and there's a whole set of climate proofing happening within infrastructure and particularly critical infrastructure that is predicated really on firstly there's infrastructure strengthening as strengthening of the physical infrastructure, but it has branched in also into the use of the systems thinking and how the different systems inter-relate. So for example in transport systems you aren't losing an entire transport system when the power goes down in one area of the city, it doesn't look out the entire system. What we've really tried to do, and I'm sorry that I had this as a clickable powerpoint so underneath there is we've really critiqued that approach from the perspective of capabilities, competencies and capacities to say that there's a lot of work that looking at those harder systems approaches and that it takes a kind of hard system approach is looking at the physical infrastructure, but much less that's looking to build on those competencies and capacities that allow the governance to work, to allow the skills to actually be able to implement a systems-based approach and that's partly because you know funding and I think politically as well the hard infrastructure the physical infrastructure is visible so it's you build a seawall and you're able to be accountable to people having done something and these more soft systems investments are much less visible and therefore harder to A champion and B kind of defend in terms of accountability, but some of the important examples that we then matched across the framework around individual organizational institutional competencies were really really interesting just simple things like in some of the terms of references we found for some of the resilience officers within cities having the space within there to take advantage of unexpected opportunities as they arise and also be able to deal with prices as they arise you'd be surprised how these terms of reference were like here's your job it's fully written out but actually unexpected things happen that's part of the job of being you know to working in resilience is dealing with crises but also picking up on where there might be opportunities so you can see the covid crisis as a place where actually if someone has space within there within their terms of reference a job description they can they can seize on the potential that the covid crisis in response is providing to actually embed more resilience action in these structures we also tend to things like adaptive management techniques i don't know many people i'm sure are aware of these where you're attempting to essentially be able to constantly refine and revisit management plans and they become really popular in water management in particular um the one of the examples from santa clara valley in the us in california um but also thinking in terms of those institutional incentives and why how institutional institutions as norms and rules of procedure embed or don't embed resilience so in india in particular looking at the um the devolution of power and authority where you have a process of decentralization but the power isn't being devolved to a sufficiently low level to enable people to actually have the incentives to invest in resilience and we also looked at softer examples around learning and how to move from didactic to relational learning so share learning dialogues where different stakeholders are able to come together repeatedly and build the trust and learn about each other's sectors and then start thinking in more in more systems ways and the third uh a third area a third area fairly briefly around urban planning so what we see at the moment around urban planning and what's built in these set of uh formal planning rules that are quite common and taught across the world it's quite a professional set of uh of understandings of how to plan in urban areas but for resilience we see real challenges with that because of the informality of many cities particularly in the global south so if you if you only have 30 percent of the of the economic activity through the formal system then actually those planning regulations aren't going to touch on the other 70 percent so not only is it missing that informal sector but actually it's it's missing the potential of the informal sector so what we've looked to is to try and tackle some of those equity um challenges by by looking at where the informal sector can actually be drawn on as a as an opportunity so there are a whole range of examples there of how you can embrace the informality rather than fighting against it with formal planning regulations so using informal knowledges in particularly in informal settlements we've got lots of great examples of self enumeration like in Cape Town because the the general regulations for citizens don't apply and you don't the governments don't actually know who is living within their own city so it's hard to plan for them equally using systems of environmental observatories to solicit community views about the resilience in there and there's fantastic examples of Manisales in Colombia where by setting up these multiple observatories they were able to bring consent greater levels of consent around what the planners are trying to achieve and to bring in some of those informal processes and there's lots of more I guess instrumental work and technical work that uses the barefoot approach so the barefoot doctors type approach in in China it was from the 1960s onwards but bringing that into planning so that you actually train up people living in those informal settlements to act as planners and to feed into that planning system and equally as architects to start looking at the architecture and how building might might proceed and some of the work Aditya and I were involved with through the ASIN program was looking at the training of local informal builders so instead of trying to upgrade slums by you know bringing in some mortar from outside and doing those formal things actually training and working with developing an association of local masons who are building using materials that are regularly used in those slums and looking at how those can be used to build in ways that are more resilient to storms and more resilient to flooding and to create that network of the association so that people value the masons who are local but affiliated that association and there's also many examples of upgrading in situ as well around the world and the favela barrio in Brazil figures has had reversed this process of trying to evict people and seeing these as you know bad areas that need to be got rid of but actually accepting that they are part of the city and looking to have upgrade programs so that you improve the lives of people and the environments within those areas. So that provides a little snapshot of some of the resilience work and I'm sure many people are familiar that resilience has become a bit of a watchword but that provides a bit of an overview and I will let Anbel speak a little bit about our programs now by a way of a short advert and then we'll take a look at some questions. Thank you Tom like the short advert yeah so many of you will be on this webinar because you're interested in our distance learning programs and we have two programs one is the climate change and development which Tom is the director of and the sustainable development of which I'm the director of both of these programs work in the same way you've got a choice of msc but we also have postgraduate diplomas and certificates and the best thing about doing your any of these programs with us is that they're flexible and they enable you to combine your study with your work and other commitments also they are run by our tutors who are experts in their field and a lot of the work that goes on at SEDEP as Tom was saying a lot of the research feeds into the way our modules are taught all our modules are bespoke and so it's really good to have that input which is continually being updated you can see here how long the average time is it takes but I'll just show you the the kind of minimum option which is two module sessions per year and within those we basically have your elect at your core which is taken first followed by three electives this is for an msc between your modules you do your dissertation which is a little bit different to many other kind of programs that you might have been familiar with specifically perhaps your undergraduates where you would do a dissertation at the end of your study the good thing about this is that many of our students are professionals or they've already done a fair amount of work in the field that they like or they're really interested in a particular topic and being able to do your dissertation study after your dual allows you to get to grips with a subject that you're really interested in start formulating your ideas and this happens so then you will then carry on with your dissertation throughout the whole cycle of your msc as you can see here your your taught modules are interjected with your dissertation finally ending with the submission of your final dissertation paper so this is an average sort of timescale of your your program but we also enable flexibility by allowing you to drop out of a particular session for example if you finished you know your dissertation study in year one and you weren't quite ready to take up your module number two then you can defer that until the next time so that allows you a bit of flexibility and you know depending on how your lifestyle works here is a list of some well of the core and optional modules on both the programs so you can see how these are made up there are some that sort of enable you to kind of cross choose um but the core is really the um sorry the core is is really the directive so in the climate change your core will be focused on climate change and obviously sustainable development on sustainable development so they both have slightly different angles but then of course you can take some electives from each so you're not losing out and you're not completely committed to sort of only sustainable development if perhaps you are also interested in energy um so that's a short overview of our yeah I think oops of our programs and how they work um so now we're going to just open up to some questions