Urban Economics for Planners and Policymakers
This course introduces economic frameworks for understanding both the benefits and challenges of living in, working in and managing cities. Urban economics incorporates the concept of space into canonical economic models and provides a lens for analyzing and describing the nature and organization of economic activity in urban settings. We will explore questions around why cities exist at all, what determines their growth, and what features contribute to their advantages as well as their unique problems. Why do some cities grow faster than others? Can cities ever get too dense or large? We will draw from typical urban economic models and frameworks, but will also discuss and test their limits when applying them to complex urban systems. For example, how well do these models address issues of segregation and informality in cities? The course will draw from research and scholarship in the field of urban economics, as well as actual cases, policy applications and guest lecturers employing these concepts in the field. Students who take this class will be able to use economic frameworks and methods to design, evaluate and implement planning and policy interventions in a range of urban settings.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the exception of a few sessions that will be held via Zoom to accommodate guest speakers and other content delivery. Please review the syllabus and course schedule for more details. Please note that this is subject to change.
Rachel Meltzer
Rachel Meltzer is the Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Her research is broadly concerned with urban economies and how market and policy forces can shape disparate outcomes across neighborhoods. She focuses on issues related to economic development, housing, land use, and local public finance.
Dr. Meltzer’s current research explores how economic and institutional “shocks” impact retail and commercial activity and real estate markets in urban neighborhoods. These “shocks” range from gentrification to the introduction of broadband to Superstorm Sandy. Dr. Meltzer is also interested in the private provision of public goods, and she has explored a number of questions related to Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and Homeowners Associations (HOAs) about their formation and impacts on housing markets and public services. In addition, she has conducted extensive research on Inclusionary Zoning, an alternative to traditional methods of providing affordable housing, including its impact on local housing markets and the political economy behind the adoption of such policies.
Her work sits at the intersection of urban economics and planning and has been published in top policy, economics and urban planning and studies journals. Dr. Meltzer’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Kauffman Foundation.
Prior to joining the GSD, Dr. Meltzer was Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Chair of the Public and Urban Policy M.S. Degree program at the Milano School of Policy, Management and Environment at The New School, where, for over a decade, she taught in the core policy analysis curriculum. Out of that teaching experience, Dr. Meltzer authored the textbook, Policy Analysis as Problem Solving (Routledge 2018), with her New School colleague, Alex Schwartz. She has also taught classes on quantitative methods, urban economic development and public finance.
Dr. Meltzer is a Research Affiliate at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a Mortgage Officer and Project Manager for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, where she managed the financing and rehabilitation of affordable housing. Dr. Meltzer earned her doctorate in Public Policy and M.P.A. from the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and a B.A. in Psychology and Mathematics from Dartmouth College.
Transportation Economics and Finance
We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and scooters. The amount and type of available infrastructure that is available to urban travelers depends very much on who is willing to pay for it and how.
Upon completion of this course, you will be prepared to evaluate alternative methods of funding the construction, purchase, and maintenance of transportation infrastructure in terms of feasibility and fairness. You will also be prepared to use financing and pricing as tools to shape the development of transportation networks and to facilitate sustainable travel.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
The Theory and Practice of Sustainable Urban Development: SDG #11 and Beyond
This project-based course seeks a critical yet constructive approach to the emerging urban agenda formulated within the UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The inclusion of SDG#11 (“Sustainable Cities and Communities”) is considered ground-breaking for its formal embrace of cities within the international framing of sustainable development goals, by focusing attention not only on how cities can be made sustainable but also how they can become drivers of sustainability more broadly. The larger aim of the class is to develop materials to be displayed in a Virtual Pavilion on sustainable urban development sponsored by the Urban Economic Forum (UEF), in partnership with UN-Habitat and others. In preparation for these deliverables, students will examine sustainable urban development through five dimensions: scale, infrastructure, governance, technological innovation, and ethics. They also will determine whether synergies between these dimensions exist in practice, how and why, and will ask whether opportunities may exist for more robust cross-sectoral approaches to sustainability, emphasizing the range of SDGs beyond #11. In the process, we underscore the necessity of achieving sustainable development with a better appreciation for urban space and with attention to processes and metrics that help cultivate effective, long-term sustainability.
The class begins with an initial historical and theoretical exploration of sustainable urban development and its relationship to other environmental domains and international development over the past three decades. The process through which particular goals were established as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda and through which indicators were chosen as the means of measuring “success” will be a key area of focus, with a view to how they relate to local practice. Weekly readings and discussions will provide the foundational elements for students to develop a compendium of sustainable urban development practices as a key deliverable from the class. Comparative case studies will be directed towards understanding differences within and between sustainability in the Global South and North. In addition, students will produce an analytical research essay that develops a critical analysis of sustainable urban development in engagement with the case study research and/or through one or more of the five dimensions explored in class.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Land Policy and Planning for Equitable and Fiscally Healthy Communities
The course highlights the role land policy and land-based financing play in the development of equitable and fiscally healthy communities in developed and developing countries. The presentation and analysis of global cases, particularly from the Global South, on land value capture, community land trusts, and land readjustment will demonstrate why and how land markets and creative land policy approaches are relevant to planners, urban designers, real estate professionals, and risk managers, especially as they pursue sustainable, equitable urban development goals. The course identifies the relationship between planning regulations, infrastructure investments, and land value increments and the synergies that can be created at the local level to sustain municipal finances and the investments needed to battle climate change, housing crises, and informality, among other transcendental policy issues.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Reimagining social infrastructure and collective futures
Design tools and spatial approaches can play a vital role in reimagining a twenty-first century social infrastructure—the underlying structures that sustain social life, including spaces of sociability and care. This course explores how well-designed social infrastructure contributes to sustainable, just, and regenerative collective futures.
The past century’s role of government in fostering public and social infrastructure changed from Roosevelt’s New Deal to Reagan’s neoliberal and free-market economy and its aftermath. The former supported big government and its investments in public infrastructure, and the latter diminished and privatized public and social infrastructure, leaving the burden of care and civic participation to philanthropy, churches, and solidarity structures that operate at the family and household level through various local, national, and international grassroots networks.
How can we reimagine social infrastructure today, beyond the neoliberal era of privatization, fossil-fuel-driven growth, and environmental degradation, to better address societal needs and urgencies such as the climate crisis, migration, isolationism, and unprecedented socioeconomic inequality?
Social infrastructure is equally a product of imagination as it is of pragmatism. One must be able to imagine models of just and regenerative collective futures, but also produce spaces and coordinate actual processes for distributing resources and creating equitable access to social and public services across all scales of human community and ecology.
This project-based seminar will examine diverse examples of social infrastructures, community-driven spaces, and spatial processes that pool and share resources to build social cohesion in times of crisis at various scales and in various places and contexts. We will build on and spatialize visionary and pragmatic models ranging from Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato, Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg, Social Capital: Measurements and Consequences by Robert Putnam, Revolution at Point Zero by Silvia Federici, and a multitude of examples of bottom-up systems of mutual aid, solidarity, and reciprocity.
The primary goal of this course is to explore the built environment from the perspective of social infrastructure by accumulating case studies, sharing methods, developing design tools and interventions to illustrate and enact spaces for just and regenerative social infrastructures and collective futures within Earth’s capacity for reproduction. Showcases and student projects will focus on diverse shared societal resources, commons, public education, the right to assembly, empowerment, leisure, and health-, child-, elderly-, and ecological care.
The sessions will include lectures, guest lectures, discussions, and open workshops.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
Mapping the Political Economy of Space
There is no such thing as neutral space. Topography and soil history, land use and tenure chronicle, housing demands and construction costs, public policies, plot subdivision and zoning, access to water and electricity networks and other public infrastructure, negotiations and financing schemes, urban codes and insurance policies, location and surrounding context, project design and materiality choices, excavation works, execution and construction settings, labor force and machinery, completion and real estate mechanisms, occupancy, use and expansion, decay and destruction: at every turn, several agents and forces act upon space. The production of architecture and urban form is grounded in power structures, and articulating a possible political economy of space uncovers how the house, the neighborhood, the city, and the territory partake in the violent and unjust spatiality of power. This seminar is set on understanding what forces shape the built environment and in what ways by uncovering the social, economic, or political forces that impact and generate the physical and technological features of our world. The aim is to enhance our capacity to reflect on spatial conditions in a critical way, and use representation tools available to designers to do so.
The class is structured around 7 guest lectures articulating “7 Questions” on the political economy of space, prepared with readings, while students chose a topic to investigate mapping the political economy of space. Explorative mappings and graphic representations, along with short texts shall be produced in order to untangle the actors and forces acting upon space, to investigate and uncover the relationship between social, economic, and political processes and spatial form. Ultimately, the aim is to articulate a definition of what a possible political economy of space could entail, and how to use it as a critical thinking tool within design and research practices.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the exception of the following dates, when the class will meet on Zoom with guest speakers: 9/8, 9/22, 10/6, 10/20, 11/3, 11/17. Please review the syllabus for more details. Please note that this is subject to change.
NOTE: the first class meeting is scheduled on September 1 online at 6:00 PM EST – 90
Urban Ethnographies
Planners’ understanding of social process and cultural values is often woefully inadequate, and their thinking is dominated by a “one-size-fits-all” approach and by excessive attention to the values of an international middle class rather than to local experience. In this course, we will read some urban ethnography inspecting the interactions among local people, planners, anthropologists, architects, and builders in order to think against the grain, especially in cases where disputes over whose heritage is at stake dominate the discourse. We will also examine the role of conflict in shaping urban space and ask whether attempts to smooth it over are necessarily to the benefit of local populations, especially where internal factionalism and political dissent are at stake. Finally, we will also examine the role of urban space in shaping people’s subjectivities and ask what that role tells us about governmental structures and the way they affect ordinary people’s lives.
Course enrollment is limited to twelve. Six spots will be prioritized for MDes Critical Conservation students who select the course first in the lottery.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15. After that, the class will meet in person with the possible exception of one or two sessions to be held on Zoom. More details will be provided at the start of the semester or well in advance of any change.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 1st. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website
Housing and Urbanization in the United States
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes a) give rise to certain policy and planning challenges and b) should shape how practitioners respond to these challenges. A major theme of the course is that consequences of previous policy and planning interventions have had lasting effects. These are reflected today in continued residential segregation by race and income, the persistence of barriers to affordable and healthy housing, and gaps in homeownership rates and housing wealth by race and ethnicity. The theme of structural racism as shaping access to housing over US history will be examined at some length.
The course first lays out a framework for understanding the roles housing plays in individuals’ lives, neighborhoods, and the metropolis. Class sessions examine the unique attributes and roles of housing, including the role of homes as constitutive of the private and domestic realms, housing as an icon and encoder of social status, and housing as a commodity. This section of the course also explores housing as a driver of urbanization and shaper of neighborhoods, as well as theories of neighborhood change.
The next four sessions of the course focus on government interventions into housing in the United States from the beginning of urbanization up to the 1960s. Classes cover early efforts to eradicate slums and improve housing for the poor; systematic efforts to enforce segregation by race in the early 20th century including the practice of redlining; federal involvement in homeownership and suburbanization, ; the policy motivations and design of early public housing and urban renewal programs; and local interventions to regulate the development of housing and access to it, particularly in suburbs.
The third section of the course focuses on a second wave of interventions arising in the 1960s in response to unanticipated consequences of earlier interventions, including public housing and urban renewal, as well as responses to demographic and economic shifts and the Civil Rights and citizen participation movements. This section of the course examines policy interventions aimed at affordability, including rental subsidy programs, fair housing law, and community development programs, and reflects new ideas about who should be in charge of revitalization plans and where federal assistance should be targeted.
The final section of the class takes us to the present, examining more recent trends shaping housing and planning and policy interventions. Sessions will focus on the housing and foreclosure crisis and its aftermath; recent trends in and responses to concentrated poverty and segregation by race and income; and gentrification. We will also take an in-depth look at the current housing situations of low-income households and housing’s relationship to poverty and health. Final classes will look at the implications of the ongoing affordability crisis for future housing supply, as well as demographic shifts and climate change that are forcing planners and policymakers to reevaluate the design of our housing stock and its location. Given the slow departure from the housing sphere by the federal government, these sessions will necessarily focus more on local responses to housing issues.
Note: the instructor will offer online live course presentations on 08/26, and/or 08/27. To access the detailed schedule and Zoom links, please visit the Live Course Presentations Website.
Please note this course will meet online through 9/15.
The first class meeting will be on Wednesday, September 8th. The rest of the semester, classes will meet during the official scheduled time.
Analytic Methods of Urban Planning: Qualitative
How can planners understand places in a rich, meaningful, and yet systematic way? This module examines how qualitative approaches can be used in planning practice and research. Qualitative methods are particularly useful in answering why and how questions; investigating differing perceptions and values; understanding unique situations; and helping describe complex situations.
Focused on learning-by-doing, the class examines how to design a qualitative research project and reviews a range of data collection and analysis methods useful in community and organizational environments. With the aid of well-thought-out conceptual frameworks, qualitative research can be designed to make a coherent and meaningful argument. Students learn about collecting and reviewing artifacts, observing places, asking questions, engaging with diverse groups, and using visual techniques. Such data are frequently organized into specific kinds of outputs including case studies, scenarios, and evaluations. Students will try out these approaches in weekly exercises.
The class will meet online. A required in-person small-group tutorial will meet in person. Students will sign up for the session once class has started. Multiple time slots will be offered