“The UrbanShift City Academy equips learners to envision cities as socio-ecosystems, blending built and natural environments with the local economy. Learners will gain the ability to integrate challenges and solutions, nurture local contexts, and promote innovation for green and thriving urban areas”
The UrbanShift City Academy offers city officials and urban practitioners open access to eight self-paced online courses, focused on themes critical to shaping low-carbon, climate-resilient and inclusive cities.
UN Environment Programme has led the course on Green and Thriving Neighbourhoods. In this course, learners will explore how to develop green and thriving neighbourhoods with an integrated vision, a set of design strategies, and a step-by-step delivery roadmap.
COURSE AT A GLANCE
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
LOCALISED Integrated Model
Create an integrated model for neighbourhood regeneration and new developments, contextualised to your community.
Low-Carbon Design
Implement low-carbon and people-centred design at neighbourhood level for delivering sustainability, liveability, and better well-being and environmental outcomes.
Policy & Tools
Acquire greater knowledge on actionable policy, process instruments, and financing tools to oversee the sustainable and integrated design of green and thriving neighbourhoods.
Global Understanding
Integrate sustainability dimensions with quality urban design by better understanding the key methods that aim to achieve these strategies, and through a diversity of options and experiences from around the world.
COURSE OUTLINE
Section 1: Place-based Strategies
The section presents the transformative change potential of place-based actions, explaining how design decisions regarding public space, location, movement, connections, and biodiversity shape green and thriving neighbourhoods.
Section 2: System-based Strategies
This section provides guidance on the organization of systems to make a neighbourhood resource–efficient, minimizing emissions and counteracting any residual emissions in a robust and transparent way.
Section 3: Socio-economic Strategies
This section provides guidance on how holistic design can address cross-cutting issues such as community health, gender equity, and socio-economic vulnerabilities.
Section 4: A Roadmap for Implementation
This section outlines a development roadmap for implementing placemaking, systems integration and socio-economic strategies in five core stages.
