PREFACE
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This report is the result of a semester's work conducted by students of a 2-year International Master of Science Program in Urban Ecological Planning (UEP) at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. While the traditions of UEP fieldworks date back to the 1980s, this year's project work is much different than everything we have done before. Most of the previous one-semester UEP fieldworks were performed together by the entire class in one or two cities simultaneously in Nepal, India, Uganda and/or Norway and with a maximum of three case neighbourhoods in each city. The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 made international mobility close to impossible and ethnographic fieldwork very difficult. We have spent a lot of time discussing adjustments and changes to replicate teaching this semester in such a way that the students get the best learning experience possible and resemble what their forerunners had experienced in previous fieldworks. Most of the 18 students who finished this challenging semester had to stay in their hometowns located in Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iran, Nepal and Norway. They were divided into four groups of four or five, where every student was from a different country. Each of them chose their own local case study area close to where they live. Examples of the chosen spaces are road stretches, intersections, parks, public squares and markets. All the communication between students and their supervisors took place digitally. While it is unfortunate that the students could not travel together, their diverse backgrounds and all the corona-related adjustments allowed us to expand the number of case cities from one or two (as in previous fieldworks) to a total of 13 cities on three continents!