Professors:

Dr Isabelle Anguelovski

Dr Hug March

This intensive course will examine the theory and practice of sustainable development and environmental justice in cities, looking most specifically at the community and neighborhood scale and considering the experience and needs of historically marginalized groups in cities. We will explore the political economy, policy, and planning processes that create unequal and unsustainable urban communities, including loss of rural livelihoods and rural migration and uncontrolled development in the global south, and deindustrialization, urban flight, unequal development, and gentrification in the global north. Discussions will also consider the dynamics of uneven investment and municipal abandonment in both contexts. We will examine the consequences of such processes on people’s quality of life, and focus most specifically on poor communities’ exposure to environmental hazards and neglect and their lack of access to environmental goods, services, and healthy housing. The course will also bring in a variety of cases from around the world where innovative principles, tools, and techniques have been used to equitably revitalize neighborhoods and enhance the environmental quality and livability of places for people. These cases will shed light on the conditions and processes that can lead to community reconstruction, place-remaking, economic security, and environmental justice in cities. Lastly some discussions will take place around the environmental justice dimensions of climate change impacts and climate change adaptation.

We will focus on exploring the implications for practice and policy, which will be discussed within the seminar, and the mechanisms, social, political and economic necessary to make change possible and lasting. A particular focus of this seminar will be two evaluative frameworks emerging in the field which have the hope to empower all stakeholders in this process.