PREFACE

This report is the result of a semester's work conducted by students of a 2-year International Master of Science Program in Urban Ecological Planning (UEP) at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. While the traditions of UEP fieldworks date back to the 1980s, this year's project work is much different than everything we have done before. Most of the previous one-semester UEP fieldworks were performed together by the entire class in one or two cities simultaneously in Nepal, India, Uganda and/or Norway and with a maximum of three case neighbourhoods in each city. The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 made international mobility close to impossible and ethnographic fieldwork very difficult. We have spent a lot of time discussing adjustments and changes to replicate teaching this semester in such a way that the students get the best learning experience possible and resemble what their forerunners had experienced in previous fieldworks. Most of the 18 students who finished this challenging semester had to stay in their hometowns located in Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iran, Nepal and Norway. They were divided into four groups of four or five, where every student was from a different country. Each of them chose their own local case study area close to where they live. Examples of the chosen spaces are road stretches, intersections, parks, public squares and markets. All the communication between students and their supervisors took place digitally. While it is unfortunate that the students could not travel together, their diverse backgrounds and all the corona-related adjustments allowed us to expand the number of case cities from one or two (as in previous fieldworks) to a total of 13 cities on three continents!

In their project work, students practiced what we call the“Urban Ecological Planning”approach, which focuses on integrated area-based (as opposed to sectorial) situational analysis and proposal making using participatory and strategic planning methods. All students performed regular site visits and engaged with local communities and stakeholders, as much as the COVID-19 protocols allowed. Social distancing and other locally-imposed restrictions forced many of the students to look for and test new ways of collecting field data, for example using mobile applications and social networks. This has been a great learning experience for both the students and teachers. Through a combination of fieldwork and remote methods, students gained an in-depth understanding of the local contexts, which allowed them to identify opportunities and challenges in their corresponding areas. This kind of in-depth understanding would be impossible to achieve by applying more traditional technocratic and purely quantitative planning methods. In some cases, students rediscovered places they knew very well from a new perspective, and realized how complex urban development can be. Others made strategic partnerships, which will hopefully lead to implementing some of the ideas they developed. For us in the teaching team it was the first experience of supervising multiple fieldworks without physical interaction with the students. While it was difficult at the beginning, we found good ways to work together and exchange knowledge. This practice of working closely, but from a distance, seems like a very relevant and important ability in the post-COVID19 future. Each of the four student groups was responsible for developing their own report, with four or five case study chapters (one per student). This report sums up the work of the group working in Trondheim (Norway), Lalitpur (Nepal), West Bengal (India), and Shanghai (China). We hope you enjoy reading this document as much as we enjoyed supervising students in their work!

Marcin Sliwa, Cinthia Stecchini, Riny Sharma and Rolee Aranya Fieldwork Supervisors, NTNU, Department of Architecture and Planning