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Urban and Regional Sustainability and Resilience

Course Descriptions

Core Courses

Students in the MA in Public Affairs and MA in Urban and Regional Sustainability and Resilience will complete  the following core courses.   A pro-seminar flag will be attached to one core course taught by first-year students.

PAEA 501: Public and Environmental Affairs I (3 hours)

  • This course will introduce students to fundamental challenges faced by public policy makers in the fields of public and environmental affairs, analyze the roles played by institutions and actors at various stages in the public policy process, and critically analyze public policy decision-making and outcomes in real-life policy questions and situations.  

PAEA 502: Public and Environmental Affairs II (3 hours)

  • This course will address at an advanced level fundamental challenges faced by public policy makers in the fields of public and environmental affairs. Students will learn how to apply different techniques to public policy problems to analyze real-life policy questions and situations.

PAEA 600: Philosophy and Public Affairs (3 hours)

  • This course examines critical questions in the fields of public and environmental affairs from a philosophical perspective, with particular attention to liberalism as a political and philosophical tradition and questions of justice, fairness and equity in political and social systems.

PAEA 602: Organizational Communication

  • Organizational communication is strategic in two ways. Organizations emerge from strategic choices made that determine how they will function, govern, and carry out their business on a day to day basis. This in turn leads employees to make strategic choices on how they will manage daily life as an employee and more importantly how they will assist the organization in accomplishing its goals. This course is designed to assist students in understanding how organizations make strategic decisions and develop communication skills to respond effectively to organizational needs. Urban sustainability efforts will require considerable public education and persuasion and will also have to be engaged, embraced, and implemented by a wide variety of citizens and organizations. Practitioners of urban sustainability will need to be able to design and communicate organizational strategies which include communicating complex ideas, integrating various perspectives, building coalitions among groups, and keeping the public informed. In this course students can expect to study a wide array of topics such as persuasion, public relations/crisis management, strategic alignment, group communication, and communication in organizational systems.

PAEA 620: Economic Theories and Application for Public Policy (3 hours)

  • The purpose of this course is to provide students with a set of conceptual frameworks for analyzing the social, economic and political environment for public policy analysis, policy design, and advocacy. We will rely heavily on foundations of economic principles, skills and concepts. Institutional and political analysis will be heavily used as well. Students will learn to apply rational decision making principles to identify patterns of individual as well as collective behavior and outcomes to better understand public policy making. 

PAEA 622: Quantitative Analysis (3 hours)

  • This course provides students with the analytical skills they need to understand and use the myriad of data, from many different sources with many different intended outcomes, which are central to understanding the issues of urban sustainability. Students will learn how to use statistical methods, gain experience interpreting and analyzing different data sets (demographic, social-economic, environmental-scientific, financial, geographic, etc.), and develop a critical understanding of how data is used in decision-making. Students will be able to make inferences from one type of data to another in order to provide high- level analysis on topics that require an understanding of data from multiple sources and disciplines. For example, student might be asked to connect air quality data to the incidence of children\2019 asthma rates in poor inner city neighborhoods, and further to look at land use and building condition maps of those same neighborhoods to understand the additional risk presented by poor building conditions and the incidence of mold and lead paint clustered in particular parts of the community.

PAEA 624: Political Geography and GIS (3 hours)

  • GIS tools and the skills to use them are a critical part of what is expected of professionals in the various fields related to urban sustainability. This requires an understanding of when and why to display information geographically. Introducing students to geographic mapping skills, this course is designed to develop an understanding of the geography of place at many levels (site, community, city, region, watershed, national, and global). Students will learn how maps are constructed, what information is best presented in geographic form, and how to analyze information in geographic format. As students work through this course they will also gain a better understanding of the geographic relationships between uses and places and how geography and distance shape urban development, urban systems, and their sustainability. The past, present, and future of the city of Cincinnati will provide the foundation for practical applications of GIS.

PAEA 630: Field Experience (3 – 6 hours)

  • This is a guided internship course to be taken in conjunction with a 12-14 week field experience and/or community-based research experience in the area of public affairs, public policy, sustainability and environmental affairs. Students secure their own field experiences and receive guidance and advice during their first year on networking, resume and communication skills as they move through the process to identify professional opportunities. Course readings, discussions and assignments prepare students to succeed in their internship and help them use their experiences and observations in the field to gain a broader understanding of key issues in their discipline.  Students who choose to complete a thesis can take PAEA 648 (Thesis I, 3 hours) in place of the field experience course.  

PAEA 640: Public Policy Capstone (3 hours)

  • In this course, students will produce a public policy analysis that defines a public policy problem in their field of study, describes and assesses proposed solutions to the problem, and recommends a course of action. Note that students who choose to complete a thesis can take PAEA 649 (Thesis II, 3 hours) in place of the public policy capstone. 

 

Sustainability Courses

Sustainability and Resilience students take 9.0 credits from URST 650 and above.  Typically, students will take 3.0 hours of URST 650+ coursework in the Fall and Spring semesters of the program.  Although most URST 650+ courses are 3.0 hours, the number of credit hours may vary from 1-3 hours, providing additional flexibility to offer two 1.5 credit (or three 1.0 credit) URST 650+ courses in a given semester depending on student needs, faculty expertise, and resources. URST 650 courses will be drawn from the following courses: 

 

URST 650: Environmental Biology (1-3 hours)

Introduces students to the natural environmental systems at play in urban and regional settings. Water, energy, waste, climate, pollution, and land systems will be discussed.

 

URST 651: Corporate Sustainability  (1-3 hours)

Introduces students to the role of private interests and corporate citizens in the area of urban and regional environmental policy, and to corporate best practices, motivations and the economic implications and intersections of private interests and public goods.

 

URST 654: Food and Agriculture, Land (1-3 hours)

Considers social, economic, and environmental implications of agriculture. Begins with a consideration scavenging, gathering and hunting, exploring the social, economic and environmental implications of these practices. Then the course considers the long, slow, difficult, and varied processes of developing agriculture and the keeping of livestock in different areas of the world and the attendant social, economic and environmental implications. The course explores biologist A. Duncan Brown's contention that agriculture has been the most powerful biological event of recent times.

 

URST 655: Urban Development and Space (1-3 hours)

This course is a careful investigation of urban development patterns and the organization of urban space. We will cover the history of human development patterns from a design perspective. This will include the move of populations from rural environments to cities, the Greek city, the Roman city, the Industrial revolution, suburban development and the megalopolis, again each focused on the physical aspects of these development periods. This course will promote an understanding of organic urban forms, concentric ring development, sector development, and multi-centric development patterns. The social and economic implications of these various development patterns will be explored. The course will include a detailed look at land use, transportation, and density as critical elements of urban form. This section of the class will cover land use regulatory structures (zoning and environmental law) and the various funding and taxing mechanisms that impact decision making. It will also include a review of metropolitan areas and how they include rural hinterlands, exurbs, suburbs and urban centers and issues of urban sprawl. This course will also examine urban design, good design principals, place making, and what makes places walkable, enjoyable urban environments. The course will also present the principals of sustainable design, and provide students with an understanding of how development and design choices impact sustainability outcomes.

 

URST 656: Urban Ecologies and Economies (1-3 hours)

An historical investigation of the intersections, collisions, and synergies between urban ecologies and urban economies. This course is intended to enhance our ecological understanding of the city. It should also stimulate our thinking about the future of the city as a habitat (settlement) and a mode of production (economy). Reflecting the complexity of the city, the course is multidisciplinary. We will be reading work in history, ecology, economics, geography, philosophy, sociology, urban planning and design, and literary theory among other disciplines.

 

URST 659: issues in Sustainability and the Environment (1-3 hours)

 In this course, students examine a key issue in sustainability or environmental affairs from multiple disciplinary perspectives.