K6ET 2195 - Cities and Urban Vulnerability, Recovery & Reconstruction

The course will introduce students to Cities and Urban vulnerability. Urbanization comes with benefits; it also comes with risks. Urban development models influence a city in all aspects of urban life and all its functions, they can also entail fragility in relation to the use of the land, the built environment, infrastructure and utilities, mobility, rural urban linkages. In a world becoming urban where cities, such as Lagos, can grow by more than one million inhabitants each year, where climate change causes events of unprecedented magnitude and where migration can rapidly change demography, urbanization can either exacerbate crisis or be resilient to them, cities can amplify crisis or maintain stability and provide shelter.

Following a first session dedicated to the urban phenomenon in relation to fragility, the course will proceed with five case studies, deep dives on urban crisis of various nature and geography, where the status quo ante, the crisis and its consequences, responses will be presented and discussed.

6-4 hours session

Evaluation will be four-tiered:

• Individual paper (1000 words), due session 3, multicausal assessment of Haiti earthquake damages and responses by the international community (25%)
• Group project (three hours), assembling the toolbox (devise urban resilience, adaptation, mitigation, reconstruction and recovery tools) due session 5 (40%)
• Individual paper (in class; 1000 words), final session, critical overview of current policies, how are cities embedded in the approach to fragility, how to best factor in fragility in urban development policies? (25%)
• Book club participation 10%