Damian Pitt, Ph.D.Associate professor and program chairThe Bachelor of Science in Urban and Regional Studies requires 120 credits, including 40 credits within the major. The program is designed so that students may enter as late as their junior year and provides a solid foundation for professional work or advanced study aimed at addressing some of the most important challenges and issues facing the U.S. And other world regions, such as urban sprawl, economic marginalization, ethnic and racial conflict and environmental degradation.
The program covers a wide range of topics related to these issues, including transportation, housing, land use, environmental management, regional and international development, human-environment interaction, globalization and socioeconomic change. Students can focus on the subject matter of their interest by choosing to concentrate in either urban planning and policy or regional analysis and development; alternatively they may opt for a generalized course of study.
Nine core courses and a lab (28 credits total) are required for all majors. These courses provide fundamental background knowledge in an array of disciplines that form the foundations of urban and regional studies, such as urban planning and design, human and physical geography, economics, environmental management, urban and public policy, and geographic information systems. Students complete their remaining 12 credits within one of the two concentrations or through a generalized course of study.The program helps develop a theoretical and methodological background as well as analytical skills that can be used to address a wide range of issues and problems. Students acquire marketable skills in qualitative and quantitative analysis, computer usage, problem solving and communication — as well as a broad perspective on environment and society — that are essential for many occupations.The generalized course of study option is designed for those students who have a broad interest in urban and regional studies. They can tailor this course of study to match not only intellectual interests but anticipated career goals. Students complete the core courses and then select the remaining 12 credits from any of the non-core courses listed below.
Learning outcomesUpon completing this program, students will have acquired the following.A multidisciplinary understanding of urban and regional dynamics and planning Students will develop a multidisciplinary understanding of the characteristics of cities and other regions, the factors that shape them over time and the role of planning in influencing socioeconomic and environmental conditions therein. Special requirementsProof of competency with Excel software is a prerequisite for; is a prerequisite for; (or permission of instructor) is a prerequisite for /; is a prerequisite for;, and senior standing are prerequisites for; and and are prerequisites for. What follows is a sample plan that meets the prescribed requirements within a four-year course of study at VCU. Please contact your adviser before beginning course work toward a degree. Introduction to the City.
3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Introduction to the various theories of urbanism and attempt to offer solutions to the problems of urban life in modern civilization. The course will survey the major works of those who have studied cities or offered solutions and alternatives to existing urban structures. The works of noted social reformers, political analysts, economists, and architects as well as urban planners will be examined through lectures, readings, films, slides, discussions and field trips (when feasible).
Physical Geography. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Examines the interrelated systems of the earth and the physical processes that create regional differences in climate and physiography. Provides a solid foundation for better understanding human-environment interactions, such as those related to climate change, by exploring topics such as earth-sun relationships, air temperature, atmospheric pressure and precipitation, winds and global circulation, plate tectonics, tectonic and volcanic landforms, weathering, and the impacts of running water, waves, wind and glaciers in shaping the landscape. Housing and Community Revitalization. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours.
The purpose of this course is to examine housing issues as a major determinant of the make-up and the quality of community life in modern American society. Attention is given to the public and private forces that influence various components of the housing issue, such as: demand for housing; housing availability to various economic and social groups; housing design and quality (including new construction, rehabilitation, historic preservation, and adaptive re-use), housing finance and the relationship of housing to planning in metropolitan areas. Design of the City. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Architecture, space and activities play a special role in the overall design of the city. These elements are analyzed to understand their interrelationships and importance to a city's visual character.
Architectural styles, civic art, effects of space on the individual and methods for designing cities will be discussed. The class is for those who want to understand urban design elements and for those who will be involved in city design. World Regions. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours.
An examination of the various regions of the earth, including land forms, climate, resources, peoples, agriculture and urban conditions. Regions to be selected each semester from Anglo-America, Latin America, western Europe, Eastern Europe, the former USSR, Middle East and North Africa, Africa (south of the Sahara), Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. May be taken only once for credit. Crosslisted as:.
Urban Social Systems. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. A study of the growth and development of neighborhoods, cities and metropolitan systems. Analyzes origins of community interests and factors that affect the ability of communities to further their interests. Particular attention is given to how patterns of service delivery and the placement of public facilities affect community interest and whether federal or municipal departments are able to set adequate community service standards.
Research and Field Methods in Urban and Regional Studies. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Introduces students to a variety of field and research techniques used to gather and analyze information to study urban and regional issues.
Key topics include designing a research project, developing and implementing surveys, conducting focus groups and observation, analyzing data statistically, interpreting and reporting results, and utilizing secondary information. The Evolution of American Cities. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. A general survey of how cities developed in the United States and the factors that contributed to the process of urbanization.
Emphasis is placed on the public attitudes and values that have dominated particular periods of history and how these values affected the efforts to urbanize. The American city is examined as a vital force in the economic, social and political development of modern America, as the major location for conflict between people of all persuasions, and as the home of much of what is meant by American 'civilization.' Urban Life in Modern America. Buku psikologi perkembangan hurlock pdf editor. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Restricted to nonmajors. Examines how a modern city functions, the public services rendered within the city and the impact of public policy on the city.
The city is treated as a system consisting of economic, social and political activities that influence and are influenced by the physical/demographic environment. Each activity is studied separately with the cause-effect relationships among the activities highlighted by an analysis of public service delivery and, more generally, urban public policy. Geography of Latin America and the Caribbean. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Examines the physical and human geography of Latin America and the Caribbean from an interdisciplinary perspective. A systems approach is used to concentrate on particular topics, themes and patterns that have broader relevance to the overall region or subregions (e.g.
Central America, the Lesser Antilles, the Andes, Amazonia) rather than on the details of each country. However, in relation to some topics, case studies are used that may focus on a particular country. Great Cities of the World. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. May be repeated under different topics for a total of 6 credits. Enrollment restricted to students with sophomore standing or with permission of instructor. An interdisciplinary course with a focus on the origin, expansion and significance of one or more cities, the specifics of its/their culture and the role of language.
Particular emphasis will be placed on relating the physical, social and economic aspects of the city's growth and development to the cultural expression of urbanism. Crosslisted as: /.
Community and Regional Analysis and GIS. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Introduces students to the core functions and applications of geographic information systems. Trains students in the management, modeling, analysis and visualization of urban and regional georeferenced data. The GIS techniques covered include the classification and symbolization of geographic features, data querying, table and spatial joining, spatial selection, projections, creation and editing of spatial features, geocoding, spatial analysis, and mapping.
Labor, Employment and Regional Development. 3 Hours.Semester course; 3 lecture hours. Examines the role of employment and the workforce in regional development from social, economic and geographic perspectives. Explores the factors impacting U.S.
Employment patterns, such as the green economy, immigration and technological change, and their implications for workers and regional economies. Also examines policy approaches to address labor and workforce issues with special consideration of disadvantaged groups and communities. Physical Geography Laboratory. 1 Hour.Semester course; 2 laboratory hours.
Pre- or co-requisite:. Problem-solving and map-reading exercises related to topics covered in, such as earth-sun relationships, air temperature, atmospheric pressure and precipitation, winds and global circulation, plate tectonics, tectonic and volcanic landforms, weathering, and the impacts of running water, waves, wind and glaciers in shaping the landscape. Provides essential analytical skills aimed at a better understanding of human-environment interactions, such as those related to climate change.
.Le Corbusier’s plan may not have had such power if he hadn’t put it on paper. The French modernist architect wanted to reform the polluted industrial city by building “towers in a park” where workers might live high above the streets, surrounded by green space and far from their factories.
His idea was radical for the 1930s, and it was his diagrams of it that really captured the imagination.' It swept everyone along,' says Benjamin Grant, the public realm and urban design program manager for the. 'They were such compelling drawings of such a compelling idea.'
Le Corbusier’s iconic plan for his 'Ville Radieuse' was an obvious choice when Grant and SPUR began to curate a new exhibition, Le Corbusier's tidy scheme for 'towers in a park,' drawn as if on a blank slate, would influence planners for decades to come. Some of the other diagrams in this survey are a bit more surprising.The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns!
In rural grids! In megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists.
In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.' The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution,' Grant says. 'Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex.' Over the years, some of these drawings have perhaps been taken too literally, while others likely lie behind some of your favorite spots in your city.
'Even if you don’t know the diagram,' Grant says, 'you might know the places that the diagram inspired.' SPUR shared these images from the exhibition, which opened this week.
If you happen to live in San Francisco, you can also visit the show in person at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery (654 Mission Street) through February (oh, and it’s free!). Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Courtesy of the Town and Country Planning AssociationThis diagram was published in Howard’s 1903 treatise Howard wanted to design an alternative to the overcrowded and polluted industrial cities of the turn of the century, and his solution centered on creating smaller “garden cities” (with 32,000 people each) in the country linked by canals and transit and set in a permanent greenbelt.
His scheme included vast open space, with the aim of giving urban slum-dwellers the best of both city and country living. He captioned the above diagram “A Group of smokeless, Slumless Cities.” Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about.
Le Corbusier’s Radiant City From Le Corbusier's 'The Radiant City' (1933)Le Corbusier was trying to find a fix for the same problems of urban pollution and overcrowding, but unlike Howard, he envisioned building up, not out. His plan, also known as “Towers in the Park,” proposed exactly that: numerous high-rise buildings each surrounded by green space. Each building was set on what planners today would derisively refer to as “superblocks,” and space was clearly delineated between different uses (in the above diagram, this includes “housing,” the “business center,” “factories” and “warehouses”). Le Corbusier’s ideas later reappeared in the design of massive public housing projects in the U.S. In the era of “urban renewal.” This is an image of the famous in St. Louis that was demolished just 18 years after it was built.
United States Geological Survey3. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City Courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation ArchivesAmerica’s divided most of the country’s unsettled interior west of the Ohio River into a neat grid of townships 6 square miles in size (each containing 36 square-mile parcels of land for the kind of agrarian, land-owning society Thomas Jefferson envisioned). If you drive across – or fly over – the Midwest today, its effects still linger in all those perfectly perpendicular roads and square farms.
Frank Lloyd Wright took the geometry of this rural grid even further in his vision for a utopia with each family living on an acre of its own. That level of density would have essentially spread suburbia over the entire country. The Street Grid Courtsey David Rumsey Map CollectionThe simple, rational street grid has been a default choice of planners for centuries (one that was widely discarded in the U.S. In the 1950s as we moved into suburbs and cul-de-sacs). The tried to establish a strict street grid for the development of the rest of the island.
Several decades later, this 1852 map of San Francisco did the same, conveniently ignoring the city’s irregularly shaped coastline and topography.5. The Megaregion From Jean Gottamn's 'Megalopolis'Planners increasingly talk today about issues involving transportation, the economy and the environment not at the scale of communities or cities, but within whole regions where multiple metros link together. The “megaregion” concept isn’t new, though. This 1961 map from illustrates one continuous Northeastern megaregion from Washington, D.C., to Boston.6. The Transect Courtesy Andres DuanyTransects have been used by planners as a visual tool to divide landscapes into multiple uses. This particular one, created by architect Andres Duany, illustrates the rural-to-urban gradation between nature and dense urban zones and has become a popular framework among New Urbanists.7. The Setback Principle From New York's 1916 Zoning ResolutionAs cities came to fill with skyscrapers in the early 20th century, planners turned their interest from the layout and footprint of neighborhoods at street level to the volume of buildings as they rose toward the sky.
New (from which the above diagram comes) required buildings to grow narrower the taller they got, so that daylight would still reach the streets below. This photo illustrates how the city’s skyline evolved as a result: The Library of Congress8. The Nolli Map Courtesy the University of California Berkeley LibraryThis 1748 map of Rome was created by Giambattista Nolli. It doesn’t look particularly exceptional today, but Nolli’s map established the now common practice of portraying entire cities from above without a single focal point (every block is viewed instead as if the cartographer were directly above it). The resulting image highlights the shape of the city’s street network and its development patterns.
Modern Urban And Regional Economics Mccann Pdf To Excel Online
.Urban economics is broadly the economic study of; as such, it involves using the tools of to analyze urban issues such as crime, education, public transit, housing, and local government finance. More narrowly, it is a branch of that studies urban spatial structure and the location of households and firms.Much urban economic analysis relies on a particular model of urban spatial structure, the monocentric city model pioneered in the 1960s by,. While most other forms of do not account for spatial relationships between individuals and organizations, urban economics focuses on these spatial relationships to understand the economic motivations underlying the formation, functioning, and development of cities.Since its formulation in 1964, of a disc-shaped (CBD) and surrounding residential region has served as a starting point for urban economic analysis. Monocentricity has weakened over time because of changes in technology, particularly, faster and cheaper transportation (which makes it possible for commuters to live farther from their jobs in the CBD) and communications (which allow back-office operations to move out of the CBD).Additionally, recent research has sought to explain the polycentricity described in 's. Several explanations for polycentric expansion have been proposed and summarized in models that account for factors such as utility gains from lower average land rents and increasing (or constant returns) due to.
Contents.Introduction Urban economics is rooted in the location theories of, and that began the process of spatial economic analysis (:3–4). Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, and as all economic phenomena take place within a geographical space, urban economics focuses on the allocation of resources across space in relation to urban areas (:7) (:1). Other branches of economics ignore the spatial aspects of decision making but urban economics focuses not only on the location decisions of firms, but also of cities themselves as cities themselves represent centers of economic activity (:1).Many spatial economic topics can be analyzed within either an urban or regional economics framework as some economic phenomena primarily affect localized urban areas while others are felt over much larger regional areas (:3). Arthur O'Sullivan believes urban economics is divided into six related themes: market forces in the development of cities, land use within cities, urban transportation, urban problems and public policy, housing and public policy, and local government expenditures and taxes. (:13–14).Market forces in the development of cities Market forces in the development of cities relate to how the location decision of firms and households causes the development of cities. The nature and behavior of markets depends somewhat on their locations therefore market performance partly depends on geography.(:1). If a firm locates in a geographically isolated region, their market performance will be different than a firm located in a concentrated region.
The location decisions of both firms and households create cities that differ in size and economic structure. When industries cluster, like in the Silicon Valley in California, they create urban areas with dominant firms and distinct economies.By looking at location decisions of firms and households, the urban economist is able to address why cities develop where they do, why some cities are large and others small, what causes economic growth and decline, and how local governments affect urban growth (:14). Because urban economics is concerned with asking questions about the nature and workings of the economy of a city, models and techniques developed within the field are primarily designed to analyze phenomena that are confined within the limits of a single city (:2).Land use Looking at land use within metropolitan areas, the urban economist seeks to analyze the spatial organization of activities within cities. In attempts to explain observed patterns of land use, the urban economist examines the intra-city location choices of firms and households.
Modern Urban And Regional Economics Mccann Pdf To Excel Free
Considering the spatial organization of activities within cities, urban economics addresses questions in terms of what determines the price of land and why those prices vary across space, the economic forces that caused the spread of employment from the central core of cities outward, identifying land-use controls, such as zoning, and interpreting how such controls affect the urban economy (:14).Economic policy Economic policy is often implemented at the urban level thus economic policy is often tied to urban policy (:3). Urban problems and public policy tie into urban economics as the theme relates urban problems, such as poverty or crime, to economics by seeking to answer questions with economic guidance. For example, does the tendency for the poor to live close to one another make them even poorer? (:15).Transportation and economics Urban transportation is a theme of urban economics because it affects land-use patterns as transportation affects the relative accessibility of different sites. Issues that tie urban transportation to urban economics include the deficit that most transit authorities have, and efficiency questions about proposed transportation developments such as light-rail (:14). Megaprojects such as this have been shown to be synonymous with unexpected costs and questionable benefits.
Housing and public policy Housing and public policy relate to urban economics as housing is a unique type of commodity. Because housing is immobile, when a household chooses a dwelling, it is also choosing a location. Urban economists analyze the location choices of households in conjunction with the market effects of housing policies (:15).In analyzing housing policies, we make use of market structures e.g., perfect market structure. There are however problems encountered in making this analysis such as funding, uncertainty, space, etc.Government expenditures and taxes The final theme of local government expenditures and taxes relates to urban economics as it analyzes the efficiency of the fragmented local governments presiding in metropolitan areas (:15).See also. Bent Flyvbjerg, 2013, 'Mega Delusional: The Curse of the Megaproject', New Scientist, December 2, pp.
28-29Literature. Arnott, Richard; McMillen, Daniel P., eds. A Companion to Urban Economics. Blackwell Publishing. Capello, Roberta;, eds.
Urban Dynamics and Growth: Advances in Urban Economics. Elsvier Inc. McCann, Philip (2001). Urban and Regional Economics.
Oxford University Press. O'Sullivan, Arthur (2003). Urban economics. Boston, Mass: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. Quigley, John M. (2nd ed.). Strange, William C.
'Urban agglomeration'. (2nd ed.).Further reading. Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Anchor.
Kahn, Matthew. Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment. Brookings. Obeng-Odoom, Franklin. Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment. Understanding Cities & Regions: Spatial Political Economy.
Urban Economics
From United Kingdom to U.S.A.About this Item: Oxford University Press, Usa, 2013. Condition: Used; Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover.
Damaged cover. The cover of is slightly damaged for instance a torn or bent corner. Pen or pencil notes in some parts of book, however this does not interfere with your use or reading.