MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE

Healthy Urban Systems

The Healthy Urban Systems MOOC is a comprehensive introduction to a multidisciplinary framework that promotes a holistic approach to urban health, in terms of observations and actions, concepts and theories, modelling tools, scenario design, and policy and governance. Helping citizens and policymakers to better cope with urban complexity will enable the deployment of urban responses that can build synergies and contribute to health, wellbeing and equity, while ensuring that the planet carrying capacity is preserved.

Objectives

  • Understand and assess social, ecological, and psychological factors affecting the health and well-being of people who live, work and visit cities

  • Get familiar with the latest advances in urban health research, and with the most recent tools and technics enabling systemic approaches (machine learning, open and FAIR data, participatory, collaborative and action-research, etc.)

  • Develop the ability to consider and model urban health as a complex system, with multi-dimensional and multi-scale eco-systemic frameworks

  • Engage and accompany all stakeholders directly or indirectly linked to urban health, in the design of healthy, resilient, and sustainable cities

Main topics addressed

The MOOC consists of 6 modules of 2 weeks each (12 weeks in total, 5 hours per week of video-course, exercises, reading):

  • Module 1: A multidisciplinary framework

  • Module 2: Observing, measuring and representing

  • Module 3: Theoretical frameworks

  • Module 4: Tools for modeling

  • Module 5: Scenarios design

  • Module 6: Policies and governance

The final training will consist of consolidating the knowledge of these 6 modules. The daily plan repeats the 6 steps/ modules, making them more applied to a case study with interaction with stakeholders.

Learning outcomes

The deep learning of each level of complex knowledge during the MOOC (virtual part) will allow students to better interact in the face-to-face training (physical mobility part) with:

  • acquiring a better knowledge of other domains involved in Urban Health systems;

  • valorize their own skills in an interdisciplinary community;

  • adopting common knowledge of complex urban systems and their different stages of implementation;

  • various concrete tools to approach urban health complex systems with a group of actors.

Coordination

  • Prof. Céline Rozenblat, Prof. of Urban Geography and Complex Networks, Institute of Geography and Sustainability (IGD), Geosciences Faculty, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

  • Jeff van de Poël, Digital Learning Expert, Centre for Teaching and Learning (CSE), University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Collaboration

To create the MOOC, the University of Lausanne collaborated with 30 international researchers, practitioners and professionals, from the North and the South, working in the following institutions:

  • the International Science Council program on Urban Health and Wellbeing (ISC – UHWB)

  • the Institute of Urban Environment (IUE), Chinese Academy of Science in Xiamen, China

  • the International Society for Urban Health (ISUH)

  • the HUE (Healthy Urban Environments) Collaboratory

  • the World Health Organization (WHO), Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health (HQ/ECH)

The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland

UNIL - Université de Lausanne, Switzerland