UN-Habitat's Global Urban Lectures are a free resource of video lectures open to use for academic, professional or personal purposes.

Global Urban Lectures - Accessing the knowledge of UN-Habitat associated experts.

Global Urban Lectures Season 6 - Promo

In April 2014 UN-Habitat launched the Global Urban Lectures – lecture packages focused on subjects related to cities and urbanization.

Each package consists of a 15 min video, a synopsis of the topic, a biography of the speaker and links to in depth study. The speakers are associated with UN-Habitat’s work, recruited from universities, think-tanks, governments, NGO’s, and private sector institutions. The series wishes to demonstrate a sound evidence-based analysis of a given problem and issues at stake, identify propositions to address them and provide examples that demonstrate how such propositions actually work, are being tested or have been implemented.

The views expressed are the ones of the lecturers themselves and do not necessarily represent the views of UN-Habitat.

All lecture packages are available free of charge.

The Global Urban Lectures continuously launches new materials. To receive notifications of our newly released lectures, do either of the following:

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The various ways you can use the series in your work or studies. Moreover, the lectures in the series can be used either separately as stand-alone sessions, or as a group of thematic sessions to meet the needs of different users and purposes.

Examples of how to use the series:

  1. For self-learning and as a refresher course.
  2. As addition to existing curricula and regular courses offered by universities and training institutions (eg. using the videos as ‘guest lecturers’ or teasers in the syllabus of regular courses)
  3. As resource materials for new curricula and course development.
  4. To screen in public events as introduction to debates on subjects relevant to cities and urban development

The lectures target a wide and global audience comprised of universities, urban practitioners, researchers and policy makers, as well as the general public interested in cities and sustainable urbanization.

We welcome you to use this series in your work.

Overview of all seasons

  • SEASON 1: See all lectures below, find a PDF with a summary of all lectures from season one here.
  • SEASON 2: See all lectures below, download a PDF with all synopses, biographies and links here.
  • SEASON 3: At the end of the 2nd season, the Global Urban Lectures had over 50,000 views, was used in university courses across the world, had been mentioned independently as one of the best MOOCs on cities and was in the process of being translated to Arabic. It is one of UN-Habitat’s most successful outreach initiatives and is being shared across the globe, with a viewer gender balance of 46% women and 54% men, ages spanning 18-65+ the largest group 25-34 year olds, and top ten viewer countries spreading from the US to India, Colombia and France.

The 3rd season featured lecturers discussing topics such as gender inclusive urban planning, transforming cities towards low-carbon resilience, affordable housing, geo-spatial technologies for slum mapping, global economic competitor and the uses of open data to transform slum upgrading processes.

Apply to be a lecturer

The Global Urban Lectures are produced by UNI - UN-Habitat's partnership with universities worldwide. For feedback, questions and suggestions, contact unhabitat-uni@un.org

Click the pictures below to see the full lecture packages, including video, mp3, synopsis, biography and additional reading materials. All videos are also available on the UN-Habitat YouTube channel