Strand Campus
Strand Campus sits along the Thames at London's cultural heart. Alongside world-class teaching spaces, students enjoy access to the pedestrianised Strand Quad, with Somerset House and iconic landmarks just steps away.
Overview
This Sustainable Cities MSc is an interdisciplinary programme providing a critical understanding of how cities are shaped by human and physical processes. It builds deep understanding of the connections between sustainable urban and environmental futures. Our teaching focus extends beyond the technical infrastructure of sustainable urban development to consider the importance of the social infrastructures that help ensure urban resilience in the face of climate change and global environmental shifts.
We’ll cover critical social science perspectives on sustainable cities, with a focus on human geography, not engineering. At the same time, we will help you to develop transferable skills in collecting, analysing and presenting different kinds of data as well as effectively communicating your ideas using written, verbal and visual mediums to a diverse range of audiences.
Key benefits
- Drawing on the department’s cutting-edge research on cities across the world to get an in-depth appreciation of the challenges involved in the governance and development of a sustainable future for cities.
- Develop a critical understanding of urban responses to the challenges of sustainability, recognising that governance of sustainability requires both social and technical solutions.
- To learn from and compare a range of international examples, and how different contexts address and deliver urban sustainability.
- Specialise in issues of social or environmental sustainability by choosing from a range of optional modules taught by the Geography Department and beyond.
- Learn from guest practitioner and policy speakers.
- Combine academic theory and real-world experience within our environment and society internship module.
- Develop your links with the Urban Futures research group and access ongoing academic research work about the way that urban knowledges can help to produce more socially and environmentally sustainable cities.
- Develop your critical understanding of the interrelationships between urbanisation and human lifestyles, politics, economy, ecology and environment.
- Identify the challenges of managing cities in an integrated and sustainable manner.
- Help you to develop relevant transferable skills which are embedded in our learning and assessment schemes.
- Enhance your practical skills in data handling, interpretation and use.
- An optional Internship module helps students take their first steps towards employment in a relevant vocational field.
Course essentials
This Sustainable Cities Master's links to the Urban Futures research group, focusing on ongoing research about the way that urban knowledge might produce more socially and environmentally sustainable cities.
You'll be able to follow your own interests in social or environmental sustainability by choosing from a range of optional interdisciplinary modules across the Geography Department and beyond. And if you opt to join our environmental internship programme*, you'll get the chance to supplement your academic prowess with real-life urban policy experience.
You'll take an international view of cities while being taught in London, which acts as the perfect urban laboratory for the world. You'll build your awareness of the historical context and global contemporary ideas and practices relating to sustainable cities, while also studying how London's distinctive post-colonial geographies require particular policy adaptations.
You'll get to examine the key challenges of implementing policies that promote sustainable urbanism, and 'learn by doing'. You'll join Sustainable Cities MSc graduates who have gone on to work in sustainability consultancy organisations, local authorities around the world, NGOs focused on urban issues, and private-sector urban development companies.
With this Sustainable Cities MSc, you’ll get an advanced understanding of contemporary debates about sustainable cities, with a specific focus on the human and physical processes shaping urban ecologies and environments. You’ll learn from a combination of pure and applied research methods from human and physical geography.
Administrative bodies
Regulating body
Application closing date guidance
Base campuses
Waterloo Campus
Centrally located and well connected, Waterloo brings together students from health, science and law, just steps from the South Bank. It's also home to the world's #2 nursing school – the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery (QS 2026).