Urban Environmental Systems

(4 Credits)

The planet is increasingly urban and rapidly urbanizing. Cities concentrate not only people, but also infrastructure and economies, creating hotspots of risk to extreme events from heat waves and floods to pandemics. As cities become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places simultaneously more habitable, healthy, and safe, more equitable, more resilient, and more sustainable. This course will examine urban systems from an interdisciplinary approach including reading, discussion, and direct discourse with diverse scholars across the social sciences, climate sciences, ecology, and design.