Engage with the challenges facing cities around the world, from climate change to crises of urban migration, conflict, and livelihoods, and learn about different solutions that aim to create sustainable urban futures.
The urban world is transforming. Cities are being reshaped by a series of instabilities and crises. Climate change, intensifying inequalities and vulnerabilities, global migration, war and conflict, technological transformation, new patterns of work and living, and geographical sprawl are generating a sustained period of turbulence. How in the face of overlapping crises, insecurity and uncertainty, can human and non-human life survive and thrive in the city? How can sustainable urban futures be cultivated in the midst of changes in global cities?
The MSc in Cities and Sustainable Futures addresses these urgent questions by focusing on how global cities are being made and remade in relation to climate change and other challenges, different experiences of city life amid crisis, and a range of urban alternatives and experiments. You’ll learn about how cities around the world are adapting to a range of challenges, including climate change, in the context of wider efforts to generate sustainable futures. You will also develop a series of research skills and gain experience of working with partners, alongside the leadership and engagement and communication skills necessary to help create sustainable cities.
The course is designed to equip students for a wide range of jobs at the intersection of cities and sustainability. Students will exit the programme understanding the forces that are shaping and remaking cities, learning from how urban residents are living with crises across different global cities, and equipped with the skills to research, evaluate, propose, communicate, and lead solutions and alternatives that help create sustainable urban futures.
Your modules will introduce you to fundamentals of social science research on sustainable transitions and transformations, investigate how global urban life is changing amidst a range of intersecting contemporary crises, including climate change, explore emerging solutions, and leave with detailed knowledge of how the very nature of urbanism is profoundly connected to the challenges of sustainability and responding to climate change. You will also develop practical skills of leadership, public engagement and dissemination alongside designing and executing an extended piece of independent research on a particular urban sustainability problem.
Course structure
Year 1 modules
Core modules:
Sustainable Futures (30 credits)
The module introduces the causes of a range of complex global crises, and explores emerging solutions around the promise of ‘sustainable futures’, building from the Sustainable Development Goals.
Global Urban Life (15 credits)
Drawing on case studies from global cities, the module explores how urban life is changing amidst a range of intersecting contemporary crises.
Research Methods for Global Challenges (15 credits)
The module will provide advanced training in the use of research skills and techniques, with the aim of developing a range of transferable skills relevant to researching sustainable futures amid global challenges.
Cities and Climate Change (15 credits)
The module explores how the very nature of urbanization is profoundly connected to the challenges of sustainability and responding to climate change.
Sustainable Transitions and Transformations (30 credits)
This inquiry led module explores practical urban experiments that attempt to generate sustainable transitions and transformations in cities around the world. It involves visits to local sites and a fieldtrip to a UK city.
Knowledge for Action and Leadership (15 credits)
The module will develop practical skills of leadership, public engagement and dissemination relevant to creating sustainable futures.
Dissertation or Vocational Dissertation (60 credits)
The Dissertation allows students to design and execute an extended piece of research on a particular urban problem, challenge, or issue. The Vocational Dissertation option is based on working with a non-academic urban partner.
Our Masters programmes combine participatory and interactive approaches to learning, ranging from in-class activities to invited lectures from practitioners to challenge-driven collaborative projects. We are particularly keen to work with students individually to develop their learning. Throughout your study, you will be supported by an academic advisor and then a dissertation supervisor.
You will receive approximately eight hours of module contact per week during Terms 1 and 2; however, this amount can vary week to week. Teaching is delivered using a combination of lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops and local and residential fieldtrips. In total, for full-time study, you will be expected to devote around eight hours per day of study hours during term time, including all assessments.
Assessment
Summative assessments include marked assignments, such as essays, presentations or reports, as well as other forms of assessment designed to develop transferable skills such as a presentations, policy briefs and executive summaries. Summative assessments are supported by ‘practice’ formative assessments that give students the opportunity to receive feedback. Over Term 3 and the summer, you will carry out your dissertation, under the guidance of a supervisor (and partner if choosing the ‘vocational dissertation’ route).
Entry requirements
An upper second class degree in any degree, or equivalent international qualification.
A personal statement should describe your interest in Cities and Sustainable Futures and any relevant experience or study.
International students who do not meet direct entry requirements for this degree might have the option to complete an International Foundation Year.
Home students who do not meet our direct entry requirements, may be eligible for our Foundation Programme which offers multidisciplinary programmes to prepare you for a range of specified degree programmes.
The fees for this academic year have not been confirmed yet.
The tuition fees shown are for one complete academic year of study and are set according to the academic year of entry. Fees will be subject to an annual inflationary increase and are expected to rise throughout the programme of study. The fee listed above is for the first year of the course only.
Studying in a department with a global reputation for the quality of research, our postgraduates are well placed to continue research at a higher level or progress into a rewarding professional career.
Taught courses are designed to develop the transferable skills that are highly sought after by employers such as the ability to analyse and communicate complex data and make decisions, and our postgraduates are much valued in areas such as government, non-governmental organisations and the charity sector.
Other roles in which postgraduates make a real difference to people and communities include environmental consultancy, conservation, town planning, geopolitical risk analysis, market research, insurance, development work, health, public policy, social research, logistics, education, energy, utilities, tourism, banking, law, PR, IT.
Department information
Geography
Geography at Durham explores the very real challenges facing the world, be they natural or a consequence of human activity. Through teaching and research in risk, climate change, sustainable futures, hazards and security, we provide in-depth insight into these problems and how they might be resolved using practical and sustainable solutions.
The Department of Geography is a global academic centre for the study of physical and human geography. Our high-quality research and our industry connections combine to create a learning experience underpinned by the theory and practice to take on the challenges we face as a result of natural events and human activity.
We provide a leading-edge environment in which to study, giving a learning experience that is tailored to suit particular interests. We offer two suites of Masters programmes:
The courses on the Sustainable Futures route respond to the profound challenge of developing ‘sustainable futures’ in the midst of climate change, by understanding relations between climate change, cities, environmental processes and society, and on exploring and evaluating emergent sustainable solutions at different scales.
The courses on the Risk route provide a thorough grounding in theoretical and practical approaches to identifying, understanding, framing, assessing and managing different aspects of risk.
Our academic staff are experts in their field with research activity in the Department divided into seven clusters comprising Politics-State-Space, Economy and Culture, Urban Worlds, Geographies of Life as well as Sea Level, Ice and Climate, Catchments and Rivers, and Hazards and Surface Change.
The postgraduate community plays a crucial role in contributing to the Department’s research goals, by conducting original research and by learning from research-led teaching about understanding and implementing the process of turning policy into practice. An in-house conference provides the opportunity for postgraduates to present ideas.
The Department of Geography is located on the main campus of Durham University at Lower Mountjoy, not far from the historic centre of the city with UNESCO World Heritage status.
Apply
Find out more:
Apply for a postgraduate course (including PGCE International) via our online portal.
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