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Discover how our students explore international development and planning through lectures, short films, group discussions, and group roleplay in our Development Workshops.
About the Development Workshops
Each year, the Development Workshops introduce our students to the current debates and issues surrounding international development and planning. Through a mixed teaching approach of lectures, short films, group discussions, and group roleplay, our students explore key topics in urban development, urban equality, drawing on post- and de-colonial insights. These workshops are also an excellent opportunity for our students to build their professional networks by mixing with students from across the seven master’s courses across The Bartlett Development Planning Unit. Ultimately, our aim is to provide our students with a solid foundation for their future career in networking in real life and by fostering empathy with the narratives of stakeholders they are likely to work with in the future of real-world planning processes.
Previous Development Workshops
2023: Reflecting on Ethics and Positionality: a roleplay simulation along the Berbera Corridor, Somaliland
In 2023, the DPU Windsor Workshop focused on several urban environments in Hargeysa and Berbera (Somaliland), affected to different extents by the so-called Berbera Corridor – a highway infrastructure connecting Addis Ababa, capital of the otherwise landlocked Ethiopia, to the coastal city of Berbera, in Somaliland, and its new port. Such infrastructure will mark and possibly boost the social and economic development of both cities for years to come, while at the same time putting stress upon a series of urban centres – as a result of demographic changes, increased pressure over land, the exacerbation of urban-health-related threats, and the possibility of damage or destruction of tangible and intangible heritage.
In this context, our partner for the workshop, Redsea Cultural Foundation worked with us to explore such themes and to further develop an understanding of the involved dynamics, while offering mutual pedagogical benefit to DPU students. Using a collective research-based and participatory approach – involving roleplay simulations – students across different programmes will engage in reading and interpreting the complexity of overlapping narratives, their repercussions in space, the agency of space and infrastructures over such processes. As part of our roleplay, we simulated a series of interactions on social media, too, reflecting further on the potentials and dangers of documenting and exposing field activities to wider networks and audiences.
View the full photo album on the DPU Flickr ▶
2020: Covid-19 and post-pandemic responses: laying the foundations for pathways to urban equality
In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we hosted an series online sessions in our Development Workshop whereby our students explored cases in the Global South from The Bartlett Development Planning Unit's Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW) project. The workshop provided a space to reflect on the extent to which organisational and institutional practices, in the context of Covid-19, have contributed to shaping pathways to urban equality. Navigating the difficult trade-offs of the current context, the workshop also looked towards developing an ethics of professional practice, considering various scenarios and tensions between mutiple actors, scales, and long-term risk reduction.
2016 to 2018: Medellin, Colombia
Using the case of the internationally acclaimed city of Medellin, students explored how actors use their leverage to negotiate urban transformations whilst debating the new imperatives for rethinking the role of the planner in the face of the Habitat III - New Urban Agenda. In particular, the workshop focused on the urban strategies encapsulated in three strategic sites of the city where the motivations, interests and resources of urban dwellers, local government officials, civil society, private sector, and international agencies in Medellin will be deployed in myriad ways.
View the full photo album of the 2018 Development Workshop on the DPU Flickr ▶
View the full photo album of the 2017 Development Workshop on the DPU Flickr ▶
View the full photo album of the 2016 Development Workshop on the DPU Flickr ▶