i.Understanding and assessing current urban and regional development issues and corresponding strategic and interest-based policies, projects and programmes;
ii.formulation of relevant questions and research hypotheses and identification of case studies in suitable problem contexts;
iii.conception and implementation of empirical research projects in teamwork with reflected application of empirical analytical methods of urban and regional research;
iv.communication and presentation of research methods and results, formulation of recommendations for action.

Cities are very heterogeneous spaces that are also forced to basically permanently adapt to new developments of various kinds. This is unavoidable and in many cases quite desirable. It becomes problematic where the health, quality of life and opportunities of the inhabitants suffer under the structures of a city or are endangered by development processes.
The course takes up precisely such current problem contexts of urban development (e.g. environmental justice, green/blue infrastructure, climate change adaptation) and makes them the framework topic of a two-semester study project. In the first part, the students are introduced to the topic, identify and evaluate concrete case studies and develop questions and research concepts. In the second part, the empirical projects are carried out, the collected data is processed, evaluated and interpreted, and the results are presented.
The field work concentrates on the areas of investigation jointly selected in the course of the seminar, which have turned out to be interesting individual cases/projects in the sense of the framework topic (presumably in the urban centres of the Rhine-Ruhr region).
After a joint familiarisation phase at the beginning of the winter semester, the participants decide on a quantitatively or qualitatively oriented seminar. Subsequently, the corresponding events take place in parallel and in regular exchange with each other. (Note: the decision between qualitative/qualitative is basically independent of the chosen specialisation in the methods courses!)

s. Contents

will be announced in the seminar