Integrated Urban Ecosystem & Sustainable Design Principles

3 units

In today's world, your discipline has grand challenges whose solutions often lay in other realms. How will you train yourself to leverage the interdisciplinary partnerships required to innovatively solve and evolve in a rapidly changing world? The mission of this interdisciplinary course is to Advance the interrelationships of ecological and human systems toward creating a healthy, resilient, and biodiverse urban environment, and will bring together experts and students in ecology, urban design, architecture/landscape architecture, economics, social work, and engineering, drawing from inside and outside the WU community. Building from our knowledge of ecosystem principles and function, a diverse group of leaders in their fields will provide lectures, readings, and student project leadership to understand and test Healthy Urban Ecosystems Principles among human and ecological (non---human) systems and the range of socio---political processes entailed with their implementation. Class content is developed by Washington University leaders in their disciplines as well as external organizations such as the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Field Museum in Chicago, and others. This course builds upon a 1---unit fall seminar (not a pre---requisite) that introduces challenges and solutions to achieving healthy urban ecosystems, and provides students an opportunity to more deeply engage and manipulate the interrelationships of symbiotic urban systems and apply those concepts in multi---disciplinary project applications. Projects will leverage student---defined challenges in the evolving laboratory of urban St. Louis using Healthy Urban Ecosystems Principles to develop multi---disciplinary integrated solutions to challenges encountered in urban areas such as climate change and resilience, security of ecosystem services, social inequity, economic strife, and community vitality. Students will present their work in a public forum at semester's end.