Wageningen University and Research Center

This course is directed at understanding specific air quality issues in 3 themes: 1) at the global 2) regional and 3) local (urban) scale. At each scale, the focus is understanding the life cycle of natural and anthropogenic air pollutants, i.e., the processes behind emission, transport in the atmosphere, chemical conversions, and deposition on the land/ocean surface. The role of meteorology on air pollution mixing and transport is explicitly explained on each scale. The course pays attention to the effects on human and environmental health, as well as the feasibility of alternatives and the efficiency of regulation and policy. On the global scale, the focus is on tropospheric chemistry, the greenhouse effect, and stratospheric ozone. On the regional scale, the focus is on the deposition of air pollutants (clouds, precipitation, wet deposition, dry deposition), acidification, and eutrophication, with ample examples by means of the nitrogen cycle. At the local scale, the focus is on traffic and industrial emissions, the role of vegetation, and photochemical smog. Each theme is completed with a tutorial, in which problem-solving is practiced as exam training.

This course addresses the global/local nexus in the production, consumption, and use of landscapes in the world today. The aim of the course is two-fold. On the one hand, it examines the ways in which different legacies of planning and design produce different types of what we call global or globalizing landscapes. On the other hand, it studies the ways in which the valuation, production, and consumption of these global landscapes as a form of economic, social, and political capital can play a role in planning and design practices. While discussing recent theories adopted in cultural geography, sociology, and (development) economics, the course focuses on the understanding of practices and processes in which planning and design can be played out differently with varied impacts. Case studies of global/globalizing landscapes drawn from all over the world play a central role in this course. Some themes explored in this course include the relationships between landscapes and evolving notions of global cities, heritage, international trade and policy, identity formation, refugee geographies, global health, human-animal relations, and conservation. The implications of each of these themes for the tasks of landscape architecture and spatial planning are explicitly made throughout the course.