Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

This book addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of decision science and information technologies to help stabilize and revitalize distressed urban communities in the United States.

While cities in the U.S. grow and decline at various rates and for different underlying reasons, neighborhoods within cities that have faced sustained demographic and socio-economic challenges over time may have multiple factors in common, such as physical blight, widespread vacancies, underserved and marginalized populations and, in some cases, local markets that do not respond to traditional economic development strategies. These distressed communities are often indicative of high levels of spatial …

This elective course in the Public Policy PhD program provides an introduction to a wide range of decision models, methods and applications that help practitioners and researchers better understand how to represent common services and systems, and how to design practical solutions that can help people and organizations do their jobs better. Examples of public sector applications we will address include: emergency and post-disaster planning, human services, energy and natural resources and housing and community development. This course emphasizes special challenges in community-based public-sector decision-making. Communities of interest may be defined by geography, population, or a particular type of service …