The areas of focus were;

?         Urban Theories and History, The reason why it is important for practitioners to understand theory is that, depending on when you were trained and where you were trained, you were probably exposed to different kinds of theoretical ideas. And because people, when they are training often think quite closely about theoretical ideas, they forget, later on, when they begin to start practicing that those are ideas that shaped how they think. Those are ideas that give a formative articulation to the way they define problems, what they see the problems as and what they think might be solutions

?         Urban as Centers of Cultural and Social Transformation, The power and attraction of cities is closely tied to the economic opportunities they often provide. Successful and sustainable cities tend to create wealth for their elites and livelihood opportunities for others. Depending on the economic circumstances of the city, a large proportion of the population can expect to see significantly better living and working conditions in the contemporary world. A smaller proportion can expect to see some degree of prosperity; and wealth.

?         Understanding Urban Systems, Cities as systems of systems and explore various city sub-systems. Cities can be seen as a particular type of sociological system or SES in short. SES's are made up of 3 interacting domains: the social, the ecological, and the economic. There is a continuous set of flows and interactions between these subsystems. Each city has embedded within it multiple complex systems such as land, transportation, environmental services like water, sanitation and solid waste, housing, education and health care. 

?         The Challenge of Urban Politics, Planning and Governance, Ultimately, urban politics boils down to making decisions in a context of very scarce resources between competing priorities. These decisions can have short term, medium or long term impacts. Decisions on infrastructure,

?         Municipal, Regional and National Governance, the governance of cities became yet another sector or department of a large national bureaucracy. This governance framework of a strong central state with weaker peripheral regions and cities was exported in many shapes and sizes.

?         Law, Order and Conflict, Modern cities are exposed to additional forms of fragility: the ability to destroy entire cities with weapons of mass destruction; the rapid expansion of pandemics; Climate Change and global and regional economic crises. Cities can survive and thrive for over a 1,000 years if the conditions are right.

?         Urban Utilities and Services, Solid waste management has become the bane of many cities, because of growing populations, rising consumerism and the associated increase in industrial packaging materials which are difficult to recycle and segregate. The long-term solution is to consume less, recycle more, shift to biodegradable packaging materials and segregate it at source so that downstream recycling is more efficient and less damaging to the environment

?         Urban Public Finance and Taxation, state agencies and local governments, typically raise the bulk of financial resources that are required to run and manage the city and oversee the deployment of public expenditure. Their capacity to deliver and manage these processes is therefore, crucial

?         Urban Research and Methods, firstly, what are the general issues faced by researchers in the field of city and regional planning? Today there are three global conversations that are pervading every thoughtful person's mind: the first one is how to address issues of peace and conflict; the second one is what is Climate Change going to do and how is this going to affect us; lastly, how can we address this growing problem of inequality. Underlying all of these, is the theme and question of urbanization, i.e. with urbanization how are these three conversations shaped?

#SDG11

Around 30 selected students were able to participate in the seminar and the chosen few among them will accompany me for primary school reach-up next week.