URBP7005 Planning Future Cities and Regions

How URBP7005 is assessed

The published outline lists these three components and they total 100%. Read the sentence above the table as well as the table: students need to pass elements one, two and three in order to formally pass the course, so each row is a pass condition and not only a weight. Two further rules sit behind the participation component and they are separate from each other. Absence from 20 per cent of class lectures attracts one grade point deduction inside that component, and every further lecture missed costs another grade point there.

Absence without justifiable reason from more than 50 per cent of lectures results in failing the entire course, which is a course level consequence rather than a deduction; the same rule is restated in the second lecture. Attendance is recorded through the University attendance app on entering and leaving each lecture, and leave requests go to the teaching team. Late submission of any written assignment, judged by the online submission time, costs one grade increment down per day. One detail differs between documents: the outline describes groups of seven to eight, while the group project appendix and the sign-up activity on the course site both set sixteen groups of no fewer than six and no more than seven. Confirm the current position, the deadlines and the submission settings on the course site.

Current URBP7005 dates

Dates are as published in the published course outline, its two assessment appendices and the submission points on the course site for this offering. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.

What URBP7005 covers

Fourteen chapters follow the published session sequence: five on what sustainability means and how it is measured, four on urban form and movement, and five on the sectoral and regional agendas from which every group project topic is drawn.

It sets out to give a full grounding in the founding ideas and principles of city planning, approached from the standpoint of urban sustainability, so that students can think critically about the problems cities face now and will face later, at local, regional and global scale, and about the planning answers available.

Almost all of the mark rests on two pieces of writing, so the skill being built is not recall but the ability to take a city, measure something about it, and say what should change first.

How the marks are arranged, and the conditions attached

Three components carry the grade: class participation at ten per cent, an individual term paper at forty five per cent, and a final group project at forty five per cent.

The published outline states that students need to pass all three of these elements in order to formally pass the course, so a strong paper does not carry a missing group contribution. Two attendance rules sit behind the participation component and they are different rules.

Absence from 20 per cent of class lectures attracts one grade point deduction inside that component, and each further lecture missed costs another grade point there. Separately, absence without justifiable reason from more than 50 per cent of lectures results in failing the entire course rather than only the participation mark.

Attendance is recorded through the University attendance app on entering and leaving each lecture.

Sustainability, assessment and indicators

The first block of the course builds the measuring vocabulary.

It starts from the standard definition of sustainable development and its two halves, needs and limitations, adds the three pillars and the planetary boundaries framework, and then turns to how anyone knows whether a city is improving.

That means a formal assessment process, an eight step reporting sequence, a choice between six families of indicator framework, eleven criteria for judging an individual indicator, and the three decisions inside any composite index: normalisation, weighting and aggregation.

Three of the six set paper topics ask you to apply exactly this machinery to a city of your choice.

Ecological footprint and green accounting

Two responses to the same complaint about conventional welfare measures are set side by side.

The footprint route builds a new indicator, translating consumption into the productive land and water area a population appropriates, expressed in global hectares so that cities, regions and countries can be compared. The accounting route keeps the national accounts and tries to complete them, adding the nonmarket consumption and investment that a conventional net product measure omits.

The course uses the pair to teach a single discipline: say what your measure was built to establish before you use it to establish something else.

Urban form, zoning and walkability

The second block moves to the physical city.

It fixes three competing definitions of urban form, traces the reform movements from the garden city through the neighbourhood unit to radical decentralisation, and then converts design judgements into measures: densities and their denominators, floor area ratio as a control on bulk rather than shape, land use mix as entropy, balance indices, and the walkability indices used in research and in practice.

The course sets an editorial that leaves the height and compactness question open, and a study of one European capital whose inner city health record runs against the densification case.

Mobility, smart cities and resilience

Transit oriented development is taught precisely, as a station at the centre of a four hundred to eight hundred metre pedestrian catchment with mixed uses clustered around it, and financed in the local case through a rail and property mechanism that transfers development rights at the before-rail price.

The smart city sessions ask for application domains and then for the opportunities and risks each one carries. The resilience session works from a named hazard through the mechanism of harm to an instrument, and keeps mitigation and adaptation in separate columns.

Green building, health and the Chinese city

The final block is the applied agenda.

A guest lecture supplies the local evidence on green building rating, on the floor area concession that makes a voluntary standard effectively expected, and on why urban redevelopment stalls on financial viability and what plot ratio transfer is meant to do about it.

The health session treats health as both a precondition for and an outcome of development policy, with a very large cohort study on walkability and hypertension set against the counter-evidence on inner city living. The last session follows a planning system moving from adding land to improving the stock it already has.

Worked example · free

Turn a set topic into a question that fits three thousand words

Key terms

Sustainable Development

Supplying what people need now without taking away what later generations will need. The definition carries two commitments: first claim for the essential requirements of the world's poor, and the limits that technology and social organisation place on what the environment can supply.

Sustainability Assessment

The formal work of naming, forecasting and judging the effects a proposal might have on a society's sustainable development, together with the effects its alternatives might have. The proposal may be a law, a regulation, a policy, a plan, a programme or a single project.

Indicator Framework

The scheme by which a set of indicators is organised. Six families are in use: domain based, goal based, sectoral, issue based, causal and combination, and each buys a different assurance at a different cost.

Conditional Indicator

A forward looking indicator built from scenarios, which answers what the level of one variable would be if another were set at a stated level. It is used where a predictive value would be too uncertain to report as a point.

Composite Indicator

A single figure combining two or more individual indicators. Building one requires three contestable decisions: how to normalise different units, how to weight the components, and whether to aggregate them by adding or by some other rule.

Global Hectare

The unit of ecological footprint accounting, standing for the mean productivity of every biologically productive area on the planet across one year. Equivalence and yield factors convert actual hectares of each land type into it so that places can be compared.

Embodied Land

Productive area located elsewhere that is used to produce goods imported for local consumption. It is the component that makes a footprint a statement about a population rather than about a territory.

Floor Area Ratio

All the floor space in a building set against the area of the site it stands on. It controls bulk rather than shape, so the same ratio can describe a tall building on a small footprint or a low one covering half the lot.

Land Use Mix

A measure of how evenly floor space is distributed across different land use types, also called land use entropy, normally running between zero and one. Higher values shorten the trips needed to reach common activities.

Transit Oriented Development

A residential or commercial area of mixed uses laid out to put public transport within the easiest possible reach, with the station prominent, the mixed uses gathered around it, and the pedestrian given first claim inside a quarter to half mile catchment.

Transfer Of Plot Ratio

A mechanism permitting development capacity to be moved from a site where it cannot be used profitably to one where it can, either within the same statutory plan or across districts, so that the proceeds can finance renewal of the sending site.

URBP7005 FAQ

Questions students ask in each URBP7005 chapter

Why is the definition of sustainable development criticised if everyone uses it?

The editors of the reader used in this course set out three criticisms alongside the text. It takes ordinary assumptions about continued growth as the way to better welfare; it leaves the global distribution of power largely unexamined; and it is strongly human centred, resting on a notion of needs that is hard to pin down. Those criticisms are useful rather than fatal, because they mark the openings where a paper can say something the sources do not already say. Chapter 01 · Sustainable Development: Meaning, Pillars and Limits

How many indicators should a sustainability report have?

There is no general answer, and the reading treats the number as a scoping decision that follows from the audience. A report aimed at residents and the media works with a small readable set, and one well known example began with twenty. A report aimed at analysts can carry far more, but a provincial one running past ninety drew the complaint from policy makers that it held too much statistical detail and was too forbidding to pick up. Decide the audience first and the number becomes arguable rather than arbitrary. Chapter 02 · Sustainability Assessment and the Reporting Process

How do I choose between the indicator frameworks?

Start from what the city has already committed to. Where adopted goals exist, a goal based arrangement ties every number to a promise and makes gaps visible through empty subthemes. Where they do not, a domain arrangement guarantees that all three dimensions appear. Where the report is meant to fix responsibility, a sectoral arrangement does that and needs an explicit linkage section to compensate. In every case, write down the weakness you are accepting and what you have done about it, because that sentence is where the methodological credit sits. Chapter 03 · Indicator Frameworks and How to Choose Between Them

Is equal weighting the neutral option?

No. Giving every component the same weight asserts that every component matters equally to the thing being measured, which for an index of urban sustainability means claiming that a unit of air quality improvement is worth exactly a unit of income improvement. That is sometimes defensible, usually because nobody has better information, but it is never neutral, and describing an equally weighted index as unweighted is the phrasing to avoid in a paper. Chapter 04 · Composite Indices, Weighting and City Rankings

What does an ecological footprint result actually license me to say?

That a population's consumption requires a stated productive area, expressed in a unit that allows comparison with other populations and with available capacity. It does not license a claim that a settlement form caused the consumption, and it does not contain a policy. Its own authors put conceptual simplicity first among its strengths, and are explicit that a great many of the consumption effects charged to cities have nothing to do with what a city is like. Chapter 05 · Ecological Footprint and Green National Accounts

Which definition of urban form should I use in a paper?

Say which one you are using in the first paragraph, because it changes what counts as evidence. If form means physical form and design, your evidence is architectural. If it means the spatial pattern of large permanent objects, your evidence is the arrangement of blocks and infrastructure over time. If it means the composite of land use patterns, transport system and urban design, which is what this course works with, then your evidence has to include the land use schedule and the network. Chapter 06 · Urban Form and the Movements That Shaped It

What is the real difference between conventional zoning and a form based code?

Which uncertainty the city is willing to carry. Conventional zoning fixes the type of use permitted in a district and leaves the built shape relatively open within dimensional limits. A form based code fixes the shape a use may take and leaves the type of use open. That is why the participation argument is made for form based codes: a citizen can see what will physically happen where, which is said to raise comfort with greater density. Chapter 07 · Zoning, Form Based Codes and Smart Growth

Which density should I report for my case city?

Whichever one the argument needs, named explicitly. Seven components are in circulation, covering population, residential, retail, street movement, intersection, service and green density, and they do not move together. Then state the denominator, since the same district can double its reported density by switching from gross to net area, and state the spatial unit, because a census tract, a postcode and a street network catchment are three different shapes. Chapter 08 · Density, Land Use Mix and Measuring Walkability

What actually makes a development transit oriented?

Three things stated in the definition: the station is a prominent feature of the place, mixed uses cluster near it, and the pedestrian has highest priority within a ten minute walk circle, with a catchment of four hundred to eight hundred metres. A scheme whose station is a kilometre away by network distance, whose only non residential use is a supermarket, and whose parking ratio exceeds one space per dwelling fails all three and is better described as a residential scheme with bus access. Chapter 09 · Sustainable Mobility and Transit Oriented Development

How should a paper on smart cities be structured?

Follow the set topic, which is also the safest structure. Set out the concept and the domains it is applied in first, then go further and give your own reading of what it makes possible and what it puts at risk, working from one named city. That order keeps the promotional vocabulary under control, because a domain is a place where an existing planning decision gets re-made and writing the question rather than the device stops the section reading as a procurement brochure. Chapter 10 · Smart Cities and New Planning Paradigms

What is the difference between mitigation and adaptation in practice?

Mitigation reduces the driver and adaptation reduces the harm. The practical difference is in the budget and the politics. A mitigation measure produces a global benefit from a local cost, which makes it hard to fund from a local budget. An adaptation measure produces a local benefit from a local cost, which makes it easier to fund and easier to do badly, because a district can protect itself in ways that push water, heat or traffic onto its neighbour. Keep two lists and protect anything that appears on both. Chapter 11 · Resilient Cities and the Low Carbon Transition

Is the green building rating compulsory?

Not by law. Mandatory requirements in selected aspects cover thermal transfer through the building envelope, building services installations under the energy code, and the size of refuse rooms. The rating itself is voluntary, but two administrative routes make it effectively expected: the floor area concession has required a rating submission since 2011, and land sale conditions in one district require a design stage gold rating. That combination is the transferable mechanism for any city that cannot legislate. Chapter 12 · Green Building and Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

Are compact cities healthier?

The evidence is bundled rather than one directional. A very large cohort study finds higher neighbourhood walkability associated with about three per cent lower odds of hypertension, consistent across three catchment sizes. A study of one European capital finds inner city residents with lower life expectancy and more coronary infarctions than suburbanites even after comparing districts of similar income, education, wealth, unemployment and crowding. The reconciliation is that density delivers a protective attribute alongside harmful exposures, so the right claim names the attribute rather than the density. Chapter 13 · Health Dimensions of the Sustainable City

What is driving the shift towards urban renewal?

Both demand and policy. Urbanisation is described as moving from rapid growth to steady development, with growth shifting from large scale expansion to improving the quality and efficiency of existing areas. Policy then enforces the shift. A ministry document keeps land newly brought into the construction supply away from real estate development as a matter of principle, which works as a tight ceiling forcing the existing stock back into use, and a renewal plan covering five years sets out ten headline indicators and twenty three tasks to be taken first. Chapter 14 · Planning the Modern Chinese City

How to prepare for the assessments

Fix one city in the first week and carry it through every chapter, because both the paper and the project reward evidence about a place rather than a survey of a literature. After each session, write two sentences: what was measured, and what it would take to measure the same thing for your city. By the middle of the term you will have a data source and a view instead of a topic. Then work the assessment criteria backwards.

Originality means a claim your sources do not already make, so look for the place where two readings disagree and write about that. Understanding means compression, so practise stating a concept in one paragraph and then using it. Literature means assimilation, so aim for a paragraph that cites four works to make one argument rather than four that each summarise one work.

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