Urban Design for Health and Sustainability

This course considers urban built environments as complex living systems to achieve wider sustainability and liveability targets. It aims to provide students with the ability to 1) critically review sustainable, liveable and healthy city concepts, strategies and principles 2) understand key processes and tools and 3) analyse, evaluate and represent best-practice precedents. Students also develop skills for visual and verbal communication of spatial, functional, perceptual, environmental and social factors to healthy and sustainable urban environments. Topics of public space and public life, urban greening, heat islands mitigation, thermal comfort, renewable energies, water sensitive urban design and circular low carbon urban development are at focus. Students will develop intermediate-level skills in critical thinking and real-world application of the key theories, scientific achievements and practical applications to make positive design contributions to healthy and sustainable urban environments.