English

This course provides students with fundamental knowledge of the German architectural tradition through a historical survey of key buildings and urban spaces. Political, cultural, historical and technological factors are closely studied as influences on the process of design and final built forms. Throughout the course, representative architectural examples in Berlin are also studied. Students explore how the city is a particularly rich site to observe how numerous competing political visions and social movements influenced German architecture and urban development.

This course covers the basic principles, legal structures, and processes of governance at the EU level. The course introduces the EU's history, its main institutions and legal frameworks, the policymaking process, and the political struggles that take place around a number of issues that are relevant to the life sciences domains. The first half of the course provides a general background to the EU, including its history, main institutions, decision-making procedures, and implementation pathways. The second half of the course discusses the development of a number of relevant policy domains, including the internal market, marine policy, environmental policy, agricultural policy, and food policy. At the end of the course, students are able to explain the functioning of the EU’s main institutions and policies, use and analyze official EU documents and legislation, and critically appraise an ongoing policy debate.

This introductory course explores the origins of universal civil rights in the USA with an emphasis on historical events, review of biography and legacy of significant activists and change makers from the USA and other countries. The course also presents cases to examine the relationship between the causes triggering civil rights development, and how these events can relate to impactful social events and movements in the last decade in different regions of the world. The course intends to provide a theoretical background, a historical review of events, and a social analysis of movements that students can study by using varied resources for data collection and examination of influential media resources or independent documentation of these processes.

‘Geographies of Youth in Changing Societies’ studies how young people (between 4-25 years old) experience and use various places in changing societies, based on the premise that their experiences differ from those of adults.  The course examines what happens at the intersections of age and life-course (e.g. children, youth, teenagers, young adults), and places (body, home, street, neighborhood, community, city, urban, rural, (trans)national, trans local, global). The course considers young people’s lives from various but interconnected perspectives. Transformations in the context of globalization, migration and societal change define young people’s lives across the world. However, growing up in an increasingly interconnected world affects young people in different and unequal ways depending on local relations and historical contexts. This course contributes to the field by teaching how geographers and spatial planners understand and examine youth-related themes, youth’s positions in various societies and places, and their subjectivities and orientations in a constantly changing world with new possibilities as well as risks. The course provides an in-depth understanding of processes and dynamics that shape young people’s lives on various spatial scales. The places where we are born, go to school to, play, hang out, exercise, study and work are an important part of young people's lives, their everyday experiences and their identities. But young people’s relationships with these places are subject to ongoing transformations due to changing priorities, needs and aspirations across their life course. The concepts of childhood and adolescence are, however, relatively recent phenomena in Geography. Rather, in much scientific work by geographers and spatial planners, young people are seen as ‘adults in becoming’, even though the perspectives of young people on the world are qualitatively different than those of adults. The course consists of lectures and tutorials. Guest lecturers from the various sections within the Human Geography and Spatial Planning department introduce different perspectives on young people’s geographies. The first part of the course is an overview lecture that recapitulates youth as a socio-spatial construct. The geographies of youth are explored through relevant themes, such as identities and belonging, inequalities, and youth & public space. The second part of the course investigates a youth-related topic by working on their own research group project.

This course expands on what constitutes real estate business in the modern society. The course provides knowledge and skills relevant to the multidimensional real estate business field, which includes asset management, property management, facility management, and real estate development. Focus is on different financing and management models, from the perspective of a business. A central theme is corporate governance, including corporate real estate management (CREM), and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The course also introduces futures studies and gives insight into managing and financing innovation in real estate.

This course explores the origins, contemporary manifestations, strategies, impacts, and responses to extremism in Europe and the Americas, with a focus on right-wing examples. It examines the political, social, and cultural dimensions of these movements. The course also distinguishes extremism from related phenomena such as populism and nationalism, explores the motivations and ideologies behind extremism, and assesses the consequences for democracy and social cohesion in these regions. The course begins with a brief introduction to the definitions and distinctions surrounding extremism. In Section II, the course takes a closer look at how extremism has developed in contemporary European and American contexts. Section III focuses on analyzing extremist ideologies and discourses, including propaganda and online strategies, through various case studies. Finally, Section IV reflects on the social and political impacts of extremism, as well as the responses from governments and civil society. The course is taught through lectures, cross-sectional analysis, group discussions, and the use of primary and secondary sources alongside case studies.

The objectives of this course are to lead reflection and debate on personal adornment objects (concept, types, classifications); to present traditional and unconventional materials in jewelry; to present traditional, artisanal and (semi) industrial techniques for manufacturing personal adornments; and to introduce Design Course students to the development of personal adornment projects.

This course covers fundamental concepts in various computer vision topics related to robotics, examining approaches and solutions in visual recognition problems for robots. Topics include 3D environment modeling/3D reconstruction, and object detection, recognition, and tracking using deep learning. 

All students must complete an individual project on a related topic. Suggested prerequisites: Linear algebra and probability theory, programming skills. 

This course examines economic analysis applied to law. Topics may include: efficiency of law, rules of liability, tort rights and remedies, criminal sanction, legislative processes as resource allocating and income distributing mechanisms. 

The conflict in and about Northern Ireland and the long peace process present a range of ongoing challenges for politics and society. This course examines a range of thematic challenges with respect to conflict, peacemaking, and peacebuilding and democratic governance in Northern Ireland. It looks as the roots of "The Troubles," the nature of the violence, the emergence of a peace process, and how this process has developed over the last thirty years. It speaks to questions such as What caused the conflict in Northern Ireland?, Why did the peace process happen?, Does power sharing work?, and How can we address the legacy of the conflict?