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Regional Development (Fall 2016)

Course Goal and Prerequisites

The goal of this course is to provide you with both theoretical tools and practical skills to undertake applied policy analysis of in the regional development field. Given CIDE Region Centro’s focus on the subnational level and the region as an analytical unit, this course is intended to provide the student with a solid foundation of applied economic geography for public policy, combined with an understanding of spatial planning, urban planning, and the politics of urban development. While region is understood quite broadly in the course, we will focus on sub-national regional analysis. Whether you have taken a GIS course or not, I expect you to have some degree of spatial literacy by the end of the course. The course will provide you with conceptual foundations but also with opportunities to engage in practical applications.

Course Objectives:

The course is designed as a survey of the literature on spatial planning, economic geography, regional science, spatial analysis, urban politics and policy, and urban/industrial restructuring, as well as some economic development strategies’ work. Due to time constraints, the course content is necessarily a broad overview and students must go beyond the assigned readings in order to write their assignments. Using only assigned readings will not lead to a good grade!

The course is designed to provide the student with an understanding of both economic geography and spatial planning. These disciplines have numerous practical applications for public policy analysts, and as a result, this course is intended to be more than a theoretical overview, a workshop to help you hone skills and learn how to apply all the things you’ve learned in other courses in an integrated manner within the framework of regional planning and development. The course is also intended to help you develop practical skills to describe, analyze and synthesize data, on topics such as the politics of urban redevelopment, gentrification, megacities and urban expansion, industrial plant closure, geographical agglomeration and clusters, etc.

You can download my syllabus here.

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