The primary objective of the seminar is to explore cities both as man-made structures and thus built environment, but also as part of the natural environment. This implies to analyse their ecology in terms of structure and function, material inputs and output, energy flow and climate, their "product": socio-economic functions and services, but also their "ecological footprint": resource use and environmental impacts, their sustainability and role vis a vis global change: "peak oil" and the heavy dependency of cities on massive fossil fuel inputs are obvious topics.

Recognizing that cities are an indispensible part of modern societies, we want to analyse the pros and cons, identify the properties that make a city a "good" city, define measurable criteria for such "qualities", and explore tools for systemic analysis and multi-criteria decision support:       towards better - sustainable ? - cities.

Lecture Notes   (on-line PPT)

0.1 Introduction and overview	1.1 Overview, procedere	Student Registration Student course management Test results ranking Comments and Questions Discussion Forum
1.2 What is a city ?	1.2a Ecology and environmental systems
1.3 Environmental problems and policy	1.4 Environmental impact assessment
1.5 Systems analysis, modeling and simulation	1.6 Modeling land use change
1.7 Modeling urban air quality	1.8 Rational decision making
1.9 Criteria: what makes a good city ?	1.98 Urban planning, DSS: success and failures

Supporting material and on-line tools:

Introductory Multiple-choice test

Course mailing list:   urbanecology@ess.co.at

Background Reading (PDF library)	Topics and process (good start)	What is a city ? (good question)
The Assignments (the challenges)	Introductory questionnaire (.doc)	City Ecosystem (E.P.Odum)
Students' submissions	Multi-criteria DSS: terminology (PPT)	The soul of the City (Oswald Spengler)
Land use change model	External links (more or less useful)

SUTRA: Sustainable Urban Transportation	CityWare:   an urban information management	WEBAIR:   urban air quality
SUTRA project home page SUTRA PPT presentation a EU funded "City of Tomorrow" project.	CityWare home page	Seoul, Gyeongg Gee, South Korea Greater Tehran Area, Tehran, Iran