INFO 5460

The Politics and Policy of Urban Sustainability

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

Cities are increasingly recognized as a key level of government for environmental and sustainability policy. As at all levels, politics and policy are intensely intertwined, and perhaps moreso at the local level because the decisions involved often affect constituents directly and intimately -- in their neighborhoods, in their homes, in their commutes. This course explores both the politics and the policy of sustainability in the municipal context. Covering a range of sustainability issues -- such as air quality, public health, and transportation -- it looks at the dynamics of making change happen at the local level, including variations in power among municipal governments; how issues get defined and allocated; how stakeholder management takes place (or doesn't); how agencies and levels of government interfere with each other; and how best practices can (and cannot) be transferred internationally. The course is reading-intense and includes case studies by historians rather than political scientists. The focus of most readings is on the United States, but students' research projects will require looking beyond the US and transferring practices to a US city.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: Cornell Tech students.

• Understand the broad forces at play shaping urban sustainability policy, including the key drivers of environmental challenges in cities; the role and limits of municipal government; the way technology and economics shape land use; the way people understand shared public space; how cities change their environments over time; how stakeholders influence policy at the local level; and how racism and other forms of inequality create different environmental outcomes.
• Understand the role of the policy advisor to a mayor.
• Have a very high-level awareness of key tupes of environmental policies being put in place at the municipal level.
• Be able to distinguish among context analysis, problem diagnosis, and solutions in policymaking.
• Have a sense of how urban sustainability policy is likely to evolve over the next 10-20 years.
• Execute, with a team, a detailed policy analysis and recommendation for a mayor of a significant world city.

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