I took a course titled “Environmental Transformation and Regional and Urban Social Change” offered by Professor Masaki Urano in the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, since I have been interested in such things as “town development,” “cities,” and “the environment.” However, as the lectures continued, I found that I only know the surface of these words. From the beginning, I did not know what a city was. How can we call a certain place “a city” if it has many people, many high buildings standing in a row, or people from many ethnic groups? Thus, questions never stop coming up. The idea of a “city” was more complicated than I expected.

In the field of Social Science, many researchers have reflected and exchanged opinions on what a city is and have tried to establish the definition of "city." To learn the progress of urbanization is to learn many kinds of civic problems at the same time. You cannot ignore crime, pollution, environment, and natural disaster, when you think about "city." It is often the case that, we did something to develop the city, and the whole society appreciated it, and then that work turned out to be a social problem. You cannot do without technology in city planning, but you have to pay attention to environmental problems and pollution, from the social-scientific point of view.

We must learn about city planning developed in the past and think about what happens in a new plan. Participating in this class made me feel that I should not make a movement casually thinking how I want to plan city makings or that I want to do something good for the environment. We hand in our comments via Course N@vi in Prof. Urano’s class. Other students can see these comments and discover other student’s ideas. The current of the changes in society is so complicated that I concentrate on the explanations made in the class. This 90-minute lecture will be very meaningful for students interested in sociology of regional areas and of disasters.