Starting in the early years of the 21st century, most of the world’s population lived in cities. This global scenario warns that cities are the reflection of the social production of the space inherent to the capitalist system, which generates a lifestyle with specific patterns of production and consumption of goods, services, energy and natural resources. Hence, cities have become the central element of the global economic, social and environmental phenomena of our time.
Cities are a space of opportunities and of economic and social development, spaces where the advantages of technological advances are more visible, new spaces for meeting people and the general habitat are manifested with new perspectives for their development. However, despite the number of positive factors that we can identify in Latin American cities, there is another set of problems of various kinds related to them.
High levels of poverty and social exclusion, informal land markets, disorderly urbanization patterns, lack of public spaces and basic infrastructure, unemployment or underemployment accompanied by low wages, risks associated with the economic and social impacts of change climate, reactive urban planning lacking the contribution of civil society, as well as local and global environmental problems, show that Latin American cities present different levels of dysfunctionality.
Faced with this reality, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (El Colef) offers this online postgraduate program that aims to train specialists to address, with theoretical and methodological knowledge of the border, the phenomena and problems inherent in the Latin American cities of In such a way that they can be influenced, through the development and implementation of public policies and management proposals from both the public sphere and civil society.
The graduate program in 21st Century City Studies offers a comprehensive curriculum to address the problems of city dysfunction, with a special emphasis on the study of contemporary challenges that Latin American cities are facing. It is a professionalizing program, in the form of online education.
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