Profile and General Objectives of the Programme
Worldwide, urbanisation is an irreversible global process today, leading to new and highly integrated forms of large urban, metropolitan and regional networks and agglomerations. Globalisation as well as an increase in international migration lead to additional challenges for urban planning, management and development when it comes to meet the demands resulting from the presence of new groups in society with diversified national, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.
These developments entail serious demographical, economic, environmental and social changes – applying both, though in different and manifold ways, to the agglomerations of the so-called developing world (still in a phase of continuous expansion) and those of the developed world (where extension and shrinking processes can be registered all at once). At the same time, the experience of the last decades has shown that the challenges and problems of the rapid urban change cannot be coped with by methods and the know-how of different single disciplines alone. The new developments of the 21st century’s urbanisation make radically new and integrated approaches and solutions necessary that reach beyond the restrictive confines of separate technical fields.
The issues addressed in this Masters Course are related to the most pressing challenges of urban agglomerations today, including land management, environmental conditions, mobility and transportation, socio-economic differentiation, segregation and migration processes as well as urban and regional governance. They are dealt with in a global and intercultural perception linking, comparing and exchanging experiences and practices of European urban agglomerations with recent developments in highly dynamic city-regions and mega-cities worldwide.
Bringing together the diverse experiences and specific qualifications of a set of universities worldwide – and along with them the planning cultures and recent developments of relevant, yet very different city-regions and urban agglomerations - this Masters Programme enhances the attractiveness and competitiveness of these universities, and their specific know-how with regard to an interdisciplinary approach to the challenges of urban agglomerations, to students and scholars from all over the world.