VGU Urban Development Planning Overview over Modules and ...

Technical University Darmstadt www.urban-studies.de
International
Co-operation
and Urban
Development
Course description
Year One
1 Course identification
2.1.2.B
2 Module 2.3.
Physical planning,
urban design & ecology
3 Name of course Urban planning for mega events & city marketing
4 Course instructor Dr. Rod Burgess. sen Lecturer, Oxford Brookes
Dr. Claire Colomb (Bartlett School of Planning,
University College London)
5 Contents /syllabus This course is intended to provide a critical introduction to
urban marketing and planning for big events, leisure,
recreation, and urban tourism in current and future society.
Huge public-private investments in mega-events (Olympic
Games), flagship projects and high-profile cultural
amenities (museums) have been a key feature of
contemporary urban policies in many big cities, with
positive and negative impacts. Similarly, investments in
tourist infrastructure are common in smaller towns and rural
destinations – equally with uncertain and sometimes
socially undesirable results.
The emergence of urban marketing policies has been a
consequence of the structural economic changes which
have affected Western economies and cities since the
1970s: de-industrialisation; growth of the service sector;
globalisation of production, technology, capital, and cultural
flows. These trends are perceived as the main causes of a
new process of intense inter-city competition, which puts
increasing pressures on individual city governments. As a
response, city governments have increasingly turned their
effort towards proactive strategies of local economic
development aiming at capturing regional, national or global
flows. In the American context, these local proactive
policies have been labelled as the new 'urban
entrepreneurialism' (Harvey, 1989), a term since widely
applied to other contexts.
The cities' governing elites are turning to new sources of
wealth for their cities after the industrial age, implementing
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