Urban Systems

Education and Training

A number of Bachelor’s degrees, interdisciplinary Master’s degrees and structured doctoral programmes relating to urban studies are available within the scope of the Main Research Area and offer training and education in the field at all academic levels.
The already well-established urban, water, logistics and traffic-related Master’s programmes (cf. UDE Research Report 2011 on these subjects), which are mainly coordinated by the ZWU and ZLV, were joined in the winter semester of 2011/12 by two closely interconnected Master’s degree programmes coordinated directly by the Main Research Area. “Sustainable Urban Technologies” and “Urban Culture, Society and Space” develop skills from different academic cultures central to understanding and sustainable development of urban systems. The programmes are thus responding to a demand identified by many practitioners in the field for broadly educated experts for urban space with the training and skills to cooperate effectively on an interdisciplinary basis at work or in research. Over 180 applications from more than 36 countries have already been received for the third year in 2013/14, further indicating the great demand for this unique course of studies.

Since 2010 the Main Research Area has also been offering the DAAD-funded international interdisciplinary doctoral programme “Advanced Research in Urban Systems” (ARUS). 29 doctoral candidates from 13 countries are currently working in their respective disciplines, in English and German, on a range of topics and with methods and approaches from the humanities, social and educational ­sciences, epidemiology, engineering as well as planning disciplines. A number of three- and four-year scholarships have also been granted as part of another DAAD programme and are helping to raise the international appeal of this doctoral training even further. ARUS has a multinational network of partnerships with universities from the United States, Brazil, Australia and China, which is not only a source of international contacts for ARUS students but also provides important impetus for their research. In April 2013, for ­example, a highly successful joint research colloquium, also sponsored by the DAAD, was held at UFRGS (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande del Sul) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, between ARUS and the programme’s local counterpart.