Master's Degree in City Resilience Design and Management
In a world increasingly threatened by complex and rapid urbanisation and environmental, climatic and socio-economic change, this programme was created to meet the city practitioners' need to better understand and frame integrated strategies when implementing urban resilience policies and projects. At the same time, resilience is being addressed by different disciplines and from a wide range of perspectives, which sometime conflict in their meanings, approaches and methods, leading to a fragmented and confused framing of urban resilience. This master's programme provides the necessary interdisciplinary bridges, linking an integrated perspective on urban resilience to the management tools needed to design and implement city resilience.
Overview, objective and structure
The Master's Degree in City Resilience Design and Management is a one-year, full-time master's programme developed and coordinated by the International Urban Resilience Research Network and hosted by UIC Barcelona. Its title reflects the need to go beyond the "building resilient cities" paradigm, taking resilience as a process expressed through a set of capacities and emotional responses to a range of impacts; one that cannot be just "built or designed", but must be managed.
The aim of this master's degree is to provide students multiple perspectives and the multidisciplinary skills, tools and knowledge future city resilience officers require.
The programme is divided into 3 main blocks: on-site classes, a research project and work experience. The first part of the course follows a logical sequence that starts with theoretical aspects of resilience and urbanisation processes. The next four modules explore and integrate different views on resilience, related to i) the built environment and infrastructures; ii) nature and urban ecosystems; iii) economic and city services resilience; and iv) community resilience. The final and most extensive module uses a set of international case studies and workshops (on governance models, leadership and tools for managing resilience) to explore the challenges of implementation. As the course moves forward, Barcelona will be used as a case study due to its experience in resilience, and students will have the opportunity to take part in a workshop with the Barcelona Urban Resilience Lab.
Through these workshops, students will be linked to organisations, institutes and city resilience offices worldwide, giving them the opportunity to apply their learning and skills through job placement opportunities, supporting their career and city resilience strategies for a more sustainable urban future.
Prospective students
This programme is intended for university graduates from the following areas of urban studies:
- Urban and Regional Planning
- Urban Design
- Geography
- Social and Political Sciences
- Engineering
- Landscape and Environmental Design and Management
- Regional Economy, Ecology.

