Preface

This project report consolidates the results of the 2021 Autumn semester conducted by students of the 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.

For the second consecutive year, the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to conduct the usual fieldwork we have been undertaking traditionally. Before 2020, most UEP student groups have been traveling to Nepal, India and Uganda to study urban informality and practice area-based and participatory approaches to planning. However, mobility restrictions caused by the pandemic forced us to modify the fieldwork logistics and our pedagogical approaches to adjust to the uncertain situation, and at the same time work towards the similar learning objectives as before. As opposed to last year, where most students performed individual fieldwork in their home cities, in 2021 all the UEP students worked in Trondheim, Norway, which is the home city of our university. For the first time in the UEP program, the entire class has been working together in a Global North context. The students were divided into 6 groups and were assigned three different cases. This report summarizes work of the group working in the neighbourhood of Svartlamo(e)n.

In their project work, students practiced the “Urban Ecological Planning” approach, which places emphasis on integrated area-based (as opposed to sectorial) situational analysis and proposal making using participatory and strategic planning methods. Our approach was inspired by the Chicago school, which proposed ethnography as a way to study urban spaces and social ecology as a framework to understand them. This approach is not new to UEP, but this year we had to make pedagogical changes to adjust the fieldwork courses to a Global North context. This included revising our compendiums to make it more relevant to urban planning in Norway,

distributing students in groups in a way that helps them with language barriers and using our existing research network to kick start three parallel student projects in Trondheim.

By spending a large amount of time in the assigned areas and engaging with local communities as well as other relevant stakeholders, students gained an in-depth understanding of the local context. This allowed them to discover strengths and weaknesses and identify opportunities and challenges in each of their assigned areas, something that would be impossible to achieve by applying traditional technocratic and purely quantitative planning methods. The rich evidence and data collected in the field was used by the student groups as a basis for proposals for spatial and policy interventions in their corresponding areas. We hope that you enjoy reading this document as much as we enjoyed supervising students in their work!

Marcin Sliwa, Riny Sharma, Mrudhula Koshy and Peter Gotsch Fieldwork Supervisors, NTNU, Department of Architecture and Planning