**This course will be offered by Prof. Dr. Simon Güntner, Prof. Dr. Sabine Knierbein and KTH&TUW Visiting Professor in Urban Studies Dr. Henrik Lebuhn (Humboldt-University of Berlin)**

The overall goal of this course is to provide a space for doctoral students to read and reflect on key concepts in Planning Theory and Urban Studies. It should help students to position their thesis in this wider context and gain an understanding for classic and current texts, approaches and other contributions to planning theory and urban studies. It also makes students familiar with key journals in planning theory and urban studies. Besides learning about how to analyze texts and use them for writing their theses, we would like to shed a light also on the socio-historic contexts in which authors of key concepts and texts wrote their contributions. Furthermore, the participants will gain skills in reading, assessing and reviewing academic papers which are crucial for theoretical and conceptual grounding of their thesis. Another goal of the course is to initially establish a joint ‘concept cloud’ (or similar). As the approach to learning is interest-based, the participants and lecturers will collaboratively define the concepts and texts that will be considered.

In this course, students will identify, read, discuss and review key concepts and texts in planning theory and urban studies. We will collaboratively identify a body of literature, drawing on suggestions by lecturers and students. In the introductory session, students will be made familiar with key compendia in urban studies and planning theory. Besides already set foci of the lecturers for which we will identify volunteers that co-conduct the sessions on set themes (together with one member of teaching team), we will jointly define which concepts the participants consider as relevant or inspiring. We will initially sketch a concept cloud, and, on that basis, a literature research will be carried out and texts proposed, which will then be read and discussed in subsequent sessions. When working with these texts, we will also reflect more generally on how to work with theoretic and conceptual texts, how to identify arguments, implicit theories, normative positions etc., an open collection of relevant concepts will be developed throughout the course of the seminar, to which an open learning platform with 3-5 texts per concept will be developed.

Please consider the plagiarism guidelines of TU Wien when writing your seminar paper: Directive concerning the handling of plagiarism (PDF)

-       At least 80% participation in the course is mandatory for grading.

-       Participants volunteer to co-conduct one session of “set themes” in a team of two volunteers, jointly with one member of teaching team with whom you can consult prior to the session in which the concepts/text will be presented (50%)

-       Participants help to jointly establish a concept collection to which a open learning tool with key texts is related (group work, self-organized, supported by teaching team) (50%)

You should be a student ideally registered as doctoral student at TU Wien (or another university=Mitbeleger). We appreciate contributions from different disciplines that generate knowledge in urban studies and planning theory. Participants ideally simultaneously visit the course "Academic Writing and Publishing in Urban Studies and Planning Theory" (Tiss) offered by Johannes Suitner and Justin Kadi.