We live in an urban world. Cities and city-regions around the globe face pressing social and environmental challenges linked to the climate crisis, emerging infectious disease, global displacement and migration, and deepening inequalities and racial divides. But cities are also the places where solutions to these problems can be found. In Cities, Regions, Planning, you learn to apply inclusive and sustainable planning interventions, consulting skills, governance, and political procedures, and activist tools to manage urban growth (and decline), provide infrastructure, integrate newcomers, and mitigate environmental impacts.
The Cities, Regions, Planning program examines how cities and regions may be planned in more just and sustainable ways through three thematic concentrations:
Urban Worlds - engages with different ways of being in cities around the planet to consider how urban residents live, work and play in a rapidly changing global geography of interconnected urban places.
Urban Planning and Politics - deals with the institutions, actors, struggles, and processes that help create and govern communities, cities, regions, and urban networks.
Urban Political Ecology - focuses on the role of nature and environment in the process of urbanization, urban form, and urban life.
Taught by internationally recognized urban scholars and planning practitioners, students acquire the foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and technical skills to create tangible change in urban, suburban, and regional environments. Students engage with communities in Toronto, across Canada, and abroad gaining hands-on experiences of processes of urban transformations, community-based initiatives, and design and policy challenges.
Students will explore these critical urban issues:
Processes of urbanization and city life
The regional composition of the global economy
Planning theory and practice
Urban and regional planning
Urban infrastructures and mobility
Urban health and pandemic preparedness
Suburbanization, growth control, and conservation
Urban analytics and geomatics
Urban wildlife and habitats
Urban risk and resilience
Public participation in planning and governance
Urban inequalities, gentrification, and segregation
Urban ecologies
Communities and urban life
This program is supported by the CITY Institute at York University, a leading interdisciplinary center that facilitates critical and collaborative research and provides new knowledge and innovative approaches to understanding and addressing the complexity of the urban arena.
Future Events
Coffee/Tea Chat with a EUC Student
Book a 1:1 virtual chat with our current students to have all of your doubts and questions answered.
Click here
Fast Fashion Workshop
Have you ever considered where you purchase your clothes from? What factors do you consider when you go shopping? Attend the "What is Fast Fashion" workshop to learn more about relevant companies and the issues around them.
Click here
Walking in a Cars World Workshop
Living in a bigger city can be rather difficult to navigate as a single individual. As pedestrians always have the right of way, streets and more, so intersections are not based with us in mind. Join us to unpack the intersections within the city and discuss possible solutions.
Click here
