Welcome to the course Shaping Urban Futures: Working across Theory and Practice. We have designed this course for different audiences in different places, and for people that face global challenges in the future concentrations of humanity that we call the cities of the 21st century. The course is built on three basic principles. These are: First, that we need to recognize and respect the legacies of the past, and build on the unique configurations of the contemporary city if we are to shape urban futures effectively. Second, that we recognize that knowledges produced about cities emerged from challenges that are analytical in making sense of what is happening in the city, normative in making visible what should happen, and operational in challenging us to think about how to translate ideas into practice. Finally, that in considering urban futures, we need an imagination and a practice that reaches from the unique and the local to address a planetary trend by reading across different sites of urban change, different lenses for seeing the city, and different geographical scales of intervention in building a global agenda for the future of cities. This course is designed to be accessible to anyone interested in city futures. Whether you're working in government, in grassroot community organizations, in NGOs internationally, or in the urban professions who are interested in shaping urban futures. It allows you to enter the field with limited knowledge, but also allows you to explore topics in greater depth. The course emerges from a five-year international collaboration between China, Colombia, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom involving 102 researchers working on over 40 discrete projects within an overarching framework known as PEAK Urban. Work was rooted in cities of the global south, speaking from specific sites to global challenges, sites which will host the highest proportion of planetary urban growth in future decades. PEAK Urban is an acronym that draws on and describes a way of bridging research and practice that is as relevant to cities of the global north as much as the global south. It builds on the capacity of the new urban sciences to synthesize new forms of data generated by the infrastructures, logistics, and networks of the complex systems of cities, drawing on new methodologies to predict and predict. It considers how these systems are unstable and provoke novelty, new formations, and structures in emergent organisms. It addresses how different the city is seen through different lenses and disrupted by the adoption of different technologies and practices. It considers how different knowledges land in place. How we might promote effective knowledge exchange to build capacity in cities, nations, and at the global level. The course comprises six connected modules. Shaping urban futures and introduction, how to know a city, new urban sciences, what to know in a city, new urban formations, how are cities changing, urban disruptions, transforming the city, making a difference on the ground, and reflections on the future city, conclusion. Each module is broken into a linked series of topics, short videos of 5 to 15 minutes that introduce the student to ways of answering the core module question. You will have a chance to explore this topic further firstly, by a key reading that prompts you to think more about the subject of the video. But then if you are keen to know more, are a student of urban studies or a professional with background knowledge, there are also supplementary readings drawing on published academic research that show a pathway to go into much greater depth. PEAK Urban has produced over 300 publications, most of which have appeared in academic journals or as books. This wealth of research resources is available on the PEAK Urban website if you want to explore further still, the research base on which the topics and modules are based. After an introduction to the course, you will work on the first module, which walks through three examples of combining new data and new methodologies for understanding urban futures in the new urban science and answering the question, how to know the city through the new urban science. They are; high resolution mobility modeling based on phone data and satellite imagery data for predicting economic activity. Big-data, green space, and the environment how to value green space. The module demonstrates how urban sciences can work globally, but are also particularly valuable in data poor urban settings. Commonly the case in the global south. It highlights how such techniques are powerful but not easy to use, helped by collaboration. They have the advantage of adaptability and timeliness of research, reducing analytical costs and a value in specific contexts forecasting city futures. Because cities bring together many different systems, they represent complex systems and are characterized by the instability, disequilibrium, and the disruption that we characterize as emergence. Cities are always on the move and in the next module, we addressed the question of what to know in the city, how to look for the moments, sites, places, cultures, and changes that are often invisible to the analytical eye. We introduced the notion of looking at different archives of evidence, complicating our ways of seeing cities. We highlight the importance of shifting the sense of critical distance, looking up close and from afar, making the familiar strange in order to capture a sense of newness that changes the DNA of the city. We introduced videos that defamiliarize the viewer by reading across different sites on the planet. This sense of looking for something that is latent, incipient, or not yet here introduces a sense of understanding new formations by looking at examples of new archives of evidence, new forms of mobility, and new framing or alternate ways of seeing major urban challenges. The third module starts by explaining that we should see the city as neither just a technical nor a social, but as a socio-technical system. The challenge to realize cities that are economically, socially, and ecologically sustainable demands that we start from a sense that these imperatives rest on knowledges that are at times in commensurable, where different systems of knowledge are based in different systems of valuation and may appeal to different registers of value. Economic, social, and environmental sustainability may demand both trade-offs and commensuration challenges. Socio-technical systems are disrupted by technological changes that land in place are adopted differently and are reconfigured socially, economically, culturally, legally, politically, and environmentally. Technologies are shaped by their use. Urbanisms are not determined by technologies, but by their adoption. Exemplified here in both a cautionary tale on the stories of platform mobility and an interrogation of the fintech changes of migrant remittances in Africa and block chain cadastration in Colombia. They are paired with a focus on the everyday uses of technology in the advent of pop-up African migraine kitchens in Delhi are attempts to decarbonize domestic energy use in cities characterized by high levels of informality. The next module addresses how we might realize change on the ground. It starts from the paradoxical sense that never has it been more important to generate a global urban agenda, yet our sense of engaged work must both recognize unique histories and complicated geographies while building on the insights of new urban sciences. This demands that we consider and value different questions and different operational scales in trying to maximize reciprocal knowledge exchange between researchers, city dwellers, and institutions at local, national, and international scales. This rests on combining a parity of esteem with a recognition of difference in our approaches as we consider in turn, movements of knowledge and interventions from the informal to formal, the global to the local, and from research to practice. This combination of drawing on multiple lenses to make the city visible, reading across sites globally, problematizing how we make the goals and knowledges of urban sustainability commensurable and validizing different questions, tactics, and strategies for making a difference on the ground we characterize as an urban disposition. The disposition recognizes the challenges of generating knowledge that shapes future cities, the imperative of trying to do so, and the value of succeeding. In the concluding discussion, we provoke further conversations where we urge students to explore further the dynamics of future cities, your opportunities to develop practice, and your engagement with the course. We hope that you enjoy the course, find it fulfilling, and always welcome your feedback.
