The document discusses the challenges faced by Year 7 students in designing sustainable cities, highlighting their limited experience and understanding. It outlines a new curriculum approach that emphasizes establishing a foundational knowledge of urban issues before engaging in a design project for a new Egyptian capital. The structured process involved detailed case studies and flipped homework to foster deeper learning and promote innovative, well-informed city designs.

1. Designing a new Egyptian capital – Year 7 style
Deb Gostling: Head of Geography
@DebGostling

2. The Problem With Getting Students
to Design Sustainable Cities:
•Their assumption seemed to be that
all cities mirror the one in which they
live.
•Ideas were often simplistic and did
not transcend students’ own
experience (eg. Just ‘have recycling’,
‘have cycle lanes’).
•They could develop the skill of design
but without enriching their knowledge
beforehand, their work lacked rigour
and felt insubstantial.
•I was always disappointed by the
results.

3. The Solution? What we did differently
this time
•CURRICULUM DESIGN: Placed the
design process at the end of a unit that
developed knowledge of urban issues
around the world.
•‘RIGOUR & KNOWLEDGE’: Exposed
pupils to detailed case studies at a level
much higher than we had assumed they
could cope with. Flipped homeworks to
ensure pupils arrived at lessons with
detailed prior knowledge.
•REFLECTED REALITY: Rooted the
design in a real and current problem (a
new capital city for Egypt).
•A COHERENT DESIGN PROCESS:
Provided students with a tight design brief.

4. SOLUTION 1:
CURRICULUM DESIGN: Placed the design process at the end of
a unit that developed knowledge of urban issues around the
world.
Year 7 Cities and Urbanisation Unit:
 Lesson 1: Mega Cities
 Lesson 2: Mapping Mega Cities
 Lesson 3: Problems With Rapid Urban Growth: Cairo
 Lesson 4: Which Problem Does Cairo Most Need to
Solve?
 Lesson 5&6: Sustainable Cities: Six Cities, Six
Questions
 Lesson 7-8: A Changing London: The Past 2000 Years
 Lesson 9-10: Designing a Sustainable Egyptian Capital

5. SOLUTION 2:
RIGOUR & KNOWLEDGE: Exposed pupils to detailed case
studies at a level much higher than we had assumed they could
cope with. Flipped homeworks to ensure pupils arrived at lessons
with detailed prior knowledge.

6. SIX QUESTIONS, SIX CITIES
London
Cairo
Dubai
Shanghai
Curitiba
Los
Angeles
Detailed case studies at a level much
higher than we had assumed they could
cope with.

7. Six Questions, Six Cities: Dubai Fact Sheet
On average in Dubai, each person uses
enough energy (electricity, petrol etc) to
give off 22.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per
person per year. They call this its ‘per
capita CO2 Emissions’.
This is one of the highest figures. They use
so much energy in Dubai because the hot
climate means large amounts of energy are
used on air conditioning to keep buildings
cool enough. Also, half of all energy used in
Dubai is used to desalinate sea water (to
take the salt out of it so that it can be used
as drinking water). Building a city in the
middle of a desert means finding fresh
water can be difficult, so they have to take
it from the sea!
90 percent of Dubai’s electricity is made
using natural gas. This is a fossil fuel and
contributes carbon dioxide to the
atmosphere.
In Duabi, people use an average of 500 litres of
water per head per day. Most of that comes from
sea water that has been desalinated.
This figure is huge! Dubai uses more water than
any other city in the world, despite being built
somewhere with no freshwater supply (ie. in a
desert).
Dubai uses the water for cooling its buildings,
luxury swimming pools and cleaning buildings that
get battered by sandstorms.
Each resident of Dubai produces an average of 2.2kg
of waste per day. They are very bad at recycling it
though; at the moment only 12% of all waste is
recycled in Dubai. The government is trying hard to
solve this and aims to send no waste to landfill
dumps (‘zero to landfill’) by 2030.
It is difficult to find the data for how many miles each
person drives in Dubai. But they have one of the highest
rates of car use in the world and on average there are
2.3 cars per family. Only 13% of people ever use public
transport.
The government are trying to encourage people to use
public transport and even offered prizes of gold bars to
people who bought public transport tickets.
Dubai’s population density is 2,650 people per square kilometre. It is one of the fastest
growing cities in the world, and huge building projects are taking place all around the city.
Dubai has even gone as far as building Jumeirah Island, the world’s first ever man-made
island. A huge new building project, called ‘Dubai Waterfront’ is going to be bigger than
Manhattan (the main central part of New York).
Over 50% of all energy in Dubai is
used to ‘desalinate’ water.
Detailed case studies at a level much
higher than we had assumed they could
cope with.

8. SIX QUESTIONS, SIX CITIES: Working in groups we are going to investigate six
cities to see how sustainable each one is. We are going to ask the following
questions about each city:
1. How does transport
affect the environment
there?
2. How much waste is
produced and what do they
do with the waste?
3. How much water is used
per person?
5. Are people’s lives
getting better and are all
people treated fairly and
equally?
4. Is the city spreading into
the surrounding countryside
and how much land is used per
person?
6. How much energy is used
per person and where does
the energy come from?
Detailed case studies at a level much
higher than we had assumed they could
cope with.

9. Six Cities, Six Questions Main Task: Work in your groups to complete this research grid about different
cities around the world. Take two cities each. Fill in your columns and then collect all your information
together so you all have everything.
Question Curitiba Dubai Los Angeles Shanghai London Cairo
How does
transport
affect the
environment
there?
How much
waste is
produced?
What happens
to the waste?
How much
water is used
per person?
Detailed case studies at a level much
higher than we had assumed they could
cope with.

10. Question Curitiba Dubai Los Angeles Shanghai London Cairo
Is the city
spreading into
the
countryside?
How much land
is used per
person?
Are people’s
lives getting
better and are
people treated
equally?
How much
energy is used
per person and
where does
the energy
come from?
Total of the
ranks (ask your
teacher how to
do this)
Six Cities, Six Questions: RANKING THE CITIES
Once you have filled in the information on each city you
need to start giving each city a score for each
category. Write it in the box for that category.
The best = 1
The worst = 6
Discuss the scores in your groups (sometimes it is
complicated – it is based on your ‘best judgment’).
Once each box has a score you need to add up the
totals for each city. The city with the lowest score is
the MOST SUSTAINABLE and the city with the
highest score is the LEAST SUSTAINABLE.
Write the scores for each city in your book.
Now it is your task to write about the top and the
bottom cities, explaining why they are so good and bad.
Use the writing frame to help you.

11. If you are aiming at a Level 6+ then you need to do your own research. Try
these for starters.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/m
ar/21/greenpolitics.germany
1. Ideas from the German Parliament:
http://thecapitalcairo.com/index.html
2. The website for the new Cairo:
Smart Cities: How do we Build the Cities of
Tomorrow: Hugh Green at TEDxEmory
3. The idea of Smart Cities. Watch these TEDx talks
on YouTube by searching for this lecture in YouTube:
Europe's first carbon neutral neighborhood -
Smart Cities - Horizons
4. Find out about sustainability in Malmo in
Sweden by searching for this in YouTube:
As you research, think
carefully about how
reliable the sources of
evidence are that you
are seeing.
How can you tell if
something on the
internet is reliable?
FLIPPED HOMEWORK: RESEARCH
Flipped homeworks to ensure pupils
arrived at lessons with detailed prior
knowledge.

12. SOLUTION 3:
REFLECTED REALITY: Rooted the design in a real and current
problem (a new capital for Egypt).

13. SOLUTION 4:
A COHERENT DESIGN PROCESS: Provided students with a
tight design brief.

14. Designing the new Egyptian capital city
Your brief is to draw an annotated plan/map of the new Egyptian capital, which the
government is hoping to build in the Sahara Desert. It needs to do the following
things:
1. Provide 1.1 million homes
2. Provide buildings for the government to work in and also other places for the
inhabitants to work.
3. Provide space for people to relax and spend their leisure time in (including a
theme park)
4. Be sustainable. For this you need to consider:
① Where will you get your water from. L6+ Also include how you will dispose
of waste water.
② How will people travel around your city? How will you design your city so
that the need to travel long distances each day is reduced?
③ Where will your city get its energy from?
④ How will your city reduce consumption/packaging etc and what will it do with
its waste?
⑤ How will you make sure that people’s quality of life is getting better? This
includes being treated equally, having good quality housing (that they can
afford), having job opportunities etc?
⑥ How will you ensure that your city doesn’t sprawl further and further
outwards, eating up precious fertile farmland along the River Nile.
Tight design brief.

15. Thinking about our six cities, six questions work, can you think
of examples of things that you definitely want to AVOID in
your new city? Be specific if you can (linking them to real
cities and giving facts) and explain why these are important
to avoid.
Thinking about our six cities, six questions work, can you
think of examples of things that you definitely want to
INCLUDE in your new city? Be specific if you can (linking
them to real cities and giving facts) and explain why these
would be good things to include.
How will you make sure that people’s quality of life is getting better? This includes being treated equally, having good
quality housing (that they can afford), having job opportunities etc?
Application of the
knowledge from the
case studies.

16. What might some
of the challenges
be when building
a new city in the
desert?
Rooted in reality.

17. What might some of the challenges be when
building a new city in the desert?
Rooted in reality.

19. How will you draw
out your city map?
It should include:
• A key
• A title
• Annotations or
information boxes
around the side to
explain the
reasons for your
design. Tight design brief.

20. Why should you do this?
1. Students created innovative designs, based on the application of knowledge of
real places.
2. Students carried the knowledge of case studies into their end of year exam,
raising their attainment:
(Excerpt from a Year 7 End of Year Exam Essay – Student had a target of 5a):
“There are so many ways that a city can be made sustainable. A sustainable city needs to be able to control a lot of
things like fairness, waste produced, water use and energy. A city in Sweden called Malmo is a very good example of
how a sustainable city needs to be. Each household has a rubbish tube which you put your rubbish bag in which is then
sucked into a collection point where it is recycled. This means that less vehicles are on the road as rubbish trucks are
not needed. Public buses are filled with biogas made from old waste which is healthy for the environment as it is not
adding out more carbon dioxide like normal buses do. Every home has a gadget which tells them how much water they
have used, energy they have used and how much this will cost them, this makes them able to see how they are trying to
help the environment and how they can control it.”
3. Students really enjoyed it, particularly those with the highest prior attainment:
Parental Feedback:
“Sam is really enjoying his Geography classes and told me when I got up at 7am this morning that
he had already spent ‘several hours’ researching ideas for his new Egyptian city. He is looking
forward to getting stuck into the project.”

21. How could you learn from
our mistakes?
•The drawings were still a bit ‘weak’. Either
they looked nice and weren’t well explained,
or they looked terrible but had a good report.
Does it matter?
•Whilst it provided lots of stretch and
challenge, how could you differentiate it to
make it easier to access for the least able?
•How could you involve real planners and
architects?
•Could you make cross-curricular links that
would enhance the project further?
•How could you get students out into London
on fieldwork to back this up?