Marc Schlossberg, PhD
Professor

Co-Director
Sustainable Cities Initiative

The class is divided into a lecture and a lab component.  We will review some key GIS skills that you need to have, and we’ll be learning some more advanced GIS extensions – Network Analyst, Spatial Analyst, and 3D Analyst.  A key component of the course is working on an individual project, and labs during the final third of the term will be dedicated to that endeavor. Final products will be both a final report as well a a final poster presentation where we will invite relevant professional and campus community members to review your work. 

Our lecture time will follow a seminar format where we will discuss issues of relevance to the use of GIS and social planning, such as empowerment, citizen participation, and equity. Lecture time is aimed to get you to think about the purpose of GIS and will not necessarily link directly to lab time, which is focused on skill development.

This course may be part of the Sustainable City Year project of the Sustainable Cities Initiative.

PPPM4/538: Topics in Transportation: Bicycle Planning
This class is intended to answer the seemingly simple question: "Why don't more people get out of their cars and bike?"  The purpose of this course is to give students the opportunity to explore the various elements involved in planning and advocating for increased utilization of bicycles as a form of urban transportation.  The focus will be on three main areas: 1) Policy and planning; 2) design, safety, and legal issues; and 3) social change.  The class will consist of a combination of teaching and learning approaches, including the use of lectures, guest lectures by practitioners, in-class exercises, and out-of-class hands-on assignments.

This course may be part of the Sustainable City Year project of the Sustainable Cities Initiative.

PPPM4/507: City Growth / City Design
Why have cities and suburbs developed as they have?  What are the economic, political, social, and spatial forces that shape the American city and its environs? If the aim is to change patterns of development, what are the dimensions that need to be understood in order to put this change into effect?

This course seeks to understand the broad range of issues that have molded and continue to mold cities and suburbs. The scope will be wide and will include everything from policy, planning, and transportation issues down to specific urban design and architectural approaches/strategies.

Through lectures, discussions, case studies, and group projects, you will be asked to tease apart and ‘read’ current development patterns in an effort to understand what must be done/dealt with in order to create change.

This course is co-taught with Professor Nico Larco in Architecture. This course may be part of the Sustainable City Year project of the Sustainable Cities Initiative.

PPPM4/507: Mobile GIS
This class explores the use of GIS on Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) for use in bottom-up community planning and field data collection. Students will be given a PDA for use in the course and will learn how to use ArcPad GIS on the PDAs as well as design sophisticated data entry interfaces.

This course may be part of the Sustainable City Year project of the Sustainable Cities Initiative.

PPPM607: Sustainable Transportation

With the aim of understanding how transportation fits into the overall design and planning of sustainable cities, this course introduces a broad range of sustainable transportation and land use planning and design concepts to enable students to:

• Understand how land use and transportation planning work together for different modes of transportation, including discussions about traffic congestion, Smart Growth, Complete Streets, Context-Sensitive Design, Scenario Planning, and Transit-Oriented Development (TOD).
• Become familiar with initiatives that are transforming urban transportation, such as active transportation planning and advocacy, car sharing, bike sharing, electric vehicles, bus rapid transit, and intelligent transportation systems.
• Become familiar with sustainable transportation cases in the U.S. and abroad and the factors that influence success.
• Apply what is learned to an actual sustainable transportation project.

See selected 2013 class projects here.