Urban Resilience & Sustainability

Today’s urban water managers are faced with an unprecedented set of issues that call for a different approach to urban water management. These include the urgent changes needed to respond to climate change, population growth, growing resource constraints, and rapidly increasing global urbanization. Many water providers are now moving to a fully integrated management approach to water, focusing on 4 core areas: regenerative water services, basin-connected cities, water sensitive urban design, and water-wise communities. This course will introduce the student to the current state of urban water management, these directives for the future, and the need for systems- and design- thinking necessary for transition both learn the value of, and gain practice with, analytic and project tools currently in practice.

A survey course examining core concepts and best practices in planning and development for sustainable, equitable, carbon-neutral communities, from cities to rural areas, with emphasis on both policy and market/private sector strategies.

Explores sustainability strategies at the community scale and beyond, and the drivers of decision making and investment in sustainability action. We will explore various approaches to sustainability with the goal of answering the question, “How do sustainability leaders engage with diverse stakeholders and decision makers to implement effective, equitable solutions to environmental problems?” Led by local sustainability professionals, this course will focus on citywide sustainability solutions.

At its best, sustainability planning and management is both an example of and aims to promote social innovation, which can be defined as any new product, process, service or enterprise that dramatically improves the performance of essential community systems like energy, finance, food, housing and transportation while creating measurable social and environmental value. Seeking more than incremental “continuous improvements” or vague “better results,” social innovations are breakthroughs that require cross-sector collaboration and systems-thinking to achieve maximum scale and measurable impact. In this course, we’ll explore the emerging field of social innovation in the context of sustainable urban development and examine the core concepts, case studies and best practices that have begun to define it. We’ll look at innovations, innovators and outcomes in areas such as carbon-neutral cities, impact investing/finance, modular housing, renewable energy, sustainable food production and urban mobility and develop our own social innovation ideas and models.

The transportation sector is undergoing a revolution, with the sharing economy, new mobility options and technology advances changing not just how we travel but changing the makeup of cities themselves. This course will prepare students to be knowledgeable and effective practitioners in this revolution. Current transportation topics and policy debates will range from how we design our streets, to managing congestion, and how we price and pay for it all.

Planning for Community Resilience and Climate Action examines the relationships and connectivity between the natural environment, human society and the social ecological systems relevant to community resilience. The increasing demands of a globalizing economy, aging critical infrastructure, changing demographics, and the impacts of climate change increase concerns about the resilience of multiple scales of governance and the importance of social vulnerabilities.

Urban Resilience & Planning: The URS clinic model seeks to bring the ideas and resources of supervised MENV students to bear on real-world, real-time resilience and sustainability challenges facing Colorado communities and organizations, with an emphasis on supporting underserved and at-risk populations and places. Through research, written reports, stakeholder interviews and other methods, MENV students gain critical skills and knowledge while providing valuable professional services to community partners. Enrollment and Structure Course enrollment will be limited to 10. The course will meet weekly for 2.5 hours for the first five weeks of the term. Introductory sessions will cover key topics in the areas of mobility and sustainable community development planning, with guest lectures featuring Boulder-area resilience/climate planning professionals, including senior BHP and BCHA staff. Subsequent sessions will include supervised, team-based research and plan-writing, in preparation for formal presentations to key stakeholders in a joint, knowledge-sharing symposium. Students will meet with BHP, BCHA, city and county staff and residents throughout the term, including organizing and presenting at meetings with community stakeholders.

To make a sustainable environment, we need to have legal and governmental structures and rules that foment -- and do not stymie -- sustainable practices. This course explores how we govern for sustainable outcomes at all levels of governance, with a focus on the local. We will also examine the role that courts play in determining the lawfulness of such governance. Students will have an opportunity to role-play as lawmakers.