Courses ABOUT BOSTON

As part of its efforts, BARI seeks to support graduate and undergraduate education that involves students in research-policy collaborations. A handful of professors in the greater Boston area have been offering courses that do just this, crafting the curriculum around some project or theme that engages the students with government agencies, non-profits, or community groups.

This page acts as an archive of materials from such courses, including general descriptions, syllabi, innovative assignments, and exemplary student projects. The courses are arranged by subject matter.  Please contact us if you would like to add a course to these listings. For more on research-policy work in education, see our page on Fellowships.

Courses by Subject Area

Earth and Environment

Geographic Information Systems
Suchi Gopal, Earth and the Environment Department, Boston University

Provides a theoretical and practical introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Introduces the essentials in GIS, methods of data capture and sources of data, nature and characteristics of spatial data and objects, data structures, modeling surfaces, volumes and time, and data uncertainty. Emphasis is on applications. Laboratory exercises and Boston neighborhood projects are included.

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Education

Ethnicity, Context, and Family Dynamics
Nancy Hill, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Offered in: Fall 2012
Syllabus

Children's development does not occur in isolation. Children grow up in families with cultural backgrounds and beliefs; in neighborhoods that are homogenous or diverse and have certain resources or risks; and children grow up with varying economic and social capital. This course focuses on the competing and overlapping definitions of race, culture and ethnicity, the central role of neighborhood, including perceptions of one's neighborhood and more objective assessments; and the influence of relative and actual socioeconomic status. This course will examine how the theory and research in the social sciences has attempted to understand and disentangle these factors as they impact children and families in the followin areas: parental beliefs and expectations; parents' disciplinary strategies and affection towards their children; children's mental health, academic, and career goals. As part of learning these skills, students are asked to visit one or more neighborhoods, and to assess local conditions and social dynamics. These assignments include use of the various mapping tools supported by BARI.

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Engineering

Michael Gevelber, Mechanical Engineering Department, Boston University

The goal of this course is to increase building energy efficiency through engineering‐based analysis of building energy-related systems, equipment, and controls. The analysis addresses current and potential energy use as well as economic factors. Buildings on the BU campus as well as those in the City of Boston are subjects of our analysis.

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General Education/First Year Seminars

Reimagining Boston
David Luberoff, Robert Sampson, and Chris Winship; Sociology Department, FAS, Harvard University
Last offered in: Fall 2011
Syllabus
Article on the course from Harvard Magazine

Using a combination of guest speakers (including Boston's Mayor Thomas M. Menino), readings about cities and neighborhoods in general, and Boston in particular, this course helped students better understand Boston specifically, and also develop a better understanding and appreciation of the challenges facing American cities in the 21st century. A particularly important component of the course is a series of assignments that has students visit and observe some of the City's neighborhoods.

Worlds of Boston: Past and Present
Catherine S. Bueker, Sociology Department, Emmanuel College
Offered in Fall 2011
Syllabus

This course was a First Year Seminar with the explicit focus of better understanding the city of Boston by exploring it through a sociological lens, an intellectual paradigm new to many first year students.  In order to explore and better understand Boston's various trends and contradictions, the course explored the diverse institutions that comprise Boston to understand how they have reflected and reinforced aspects of the city. From education to politics to sports to religion, students studied how these institutions have encouraged, mirrored, and at times, altered the people of Boston, and how the people have altered them. Additionally, students went on a series of field trips to various locations tied to the readings and discussions throughout the course of the semester.

History

Building Boston in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Lizabeth Cohen, History Department, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Offered in: Spring 2005
Syllabus

This course analyzed the major developments in the built environment of the Boston area over the last two centuries. Topics covered included the evolution of commercial districts, residential neighborhoods, transportation infrastructure, and public buildings and space. The course paid particular attention to the complex interaction of architects and builders, economic and political interests, and ordinary residents in the construction of the city over time. While the course was not be explicitly comparative, it did bear in mind the ways in which Boston’s development has been unique and how it has reflected trends visible in other American and world cities.

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Management 

Advanced Applied Management, Operations, and Budgeting
Linda Bilmes, Harvard Kennedy School
Offered in: Spring 2013
Syllabus
Article on the course from the Harvard Kennedy School Magazine

This course is designed to provide students with hands-on experience of working in a local government or large private non-profit budget environment. In 2012, student projects were carried out in Boston, Somerville, Newton/State of MA, and Perkins School for the Blind. This is an advanced course that requires familiarity with variance analysis, cost accounting, activity-budgeting, capital budgeting, performance budgeting, and financial modeling.

Kristen McCormack, School of Management, Boston University

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the management consulting process and its practical application. The course simulates a small consulting firm where students are consultants. Students complete significant fieldwork outside of classroom time. Students explore dimensions of defining and understanding the consulting framework, engagements, work methodology, client relationship management, value creation, developing and delivering presentations and client follow-up. This course includes one primary deliverable: the initiation, scoping and completion of a consulting field project with Boston-based private and public sector entities.

Solving Problems Using Technology
Susan Crawford, Harvard Kennedy School
Offered in: Fall 2012
Syllabus

The course was designed to be at once an entry-level survey of the govtech landscape and a course on working with community partners to solve civic problems. For the lab portion of the course, the course focussed on the Dudley and Uphams Corner neighborhoods of Boston and worked with the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. The goal was to find innovative technological ways to enhance work that is already being done by three community organizations in Dudley and/or propose technological assistance to support work that the community there thinks it needs.

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Psychology

Advanced Methods: Social Psychology
Dan O'Brien; Psychology Department, University of Massachusetts Boston
Government/Community Partners: City of Boston's Constituent Relationship Management System, Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics
Offered in: Spring 2012
Syllabus

This course puts a new twist on a traditional upper-level psychology curriculum by involving students in neighborhood-based experiments. In Spring 2012 the course focused on an experiment that tested the effectiveness of two different messages in encouraging local residents to report public problems, like potholes, to city services. The students were involved in developing hypotheses, the materials and protocol of the experiment, and in distributing flyers that contained the final messages.

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Public Health

Community-Based Methods in Environmental Health
Jonathan I. Levy, School of Public Health, Boston University
Offered in Spring 2013
Syllabus

Low‐income urban communities are exposed to many environmental and non‐environmental stressors, but many tools and techniques for public policy decision-making do not adequately address these complex settings. This course focuses on methods for assessing and addressing local community health impacts from environmental stressors, with an emphasis on health impact assessment, community-based participatory research, and analytical methods to evaluate environmental justice. Case examples will include traffic and housing, and students will work with a community group in Boston to implement a health impact assessment on a topic of mutual interest. 

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Public Policy and Public Affairs

Gateway Cities Field Study
David Barron, Harvard Law School
Ann Forsyth, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Desig
Nicolas Retsinas, Harvard Business School 
Offered in: Spring 2013
Syllabus

In this course, students from Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, teamed up to work on interdisciplinary projects related to the redevelopment in some of greater Boston’s Gateway Cities, former industrial cities that experienced hard economic times but now are receiving renewed attention from policymakers to see how they can be redeveloped to make them important, successful places for the 21st Century. In the course, the student teams partnered with state, local and community representatives to work on specific redevelopment projects and policies.

Geographic Information Systems for Public Policy
Michael P. Johnson, Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs, McCormack Graduate School, University of Massachusetts Boston
Offered in: Spring 2013
Syllabus

The purpose of this course is to learn principles and applications of GIS to support doctoral-level research in public policy and related disciplines, such as public management, gerontology and urban and regional planning. The course has a particular focus on spatial data collection and analysis for urbanized regions within the greater Boston area. Students address basic geographic and mapping concepts as well as advanced methods suitable for doctoral research such as exploratory spatial analytic methods, model-building and multi-method & qualitative GIS. Application areas that are discussed include: economic development, housing, transportation, land use, crime and policing, census and demographic studies and public health. 

Philanthropy and Public Problem-Solving
Christine W. Letts and Jim Bildner, Harvard Kennedy School
Offered in: Spring 2013
Syllabus

This course is intended for students of Harvard College and Harvard Kennedy School to explore the role of the nonprofit sector and philanthropy in public problem-solving. The students will have a unique experiential opportunity associated with this course. The Once Upon a Time foundation has provided a gift of grant money that the students will be able to give to nonprofits. Assuming more than 20 students in the course, the foundation will provide $100,000 in grant money. We will use the greater Boston area as the focus for learning about public problem-solving and for the grants. The reason for this is to explicitly ground the grantmaking in the Harvard environment and to limit the universe for analysis for the assignments.

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Sociology

Boston's People and Neighborhoods
Don Gillis, Sociology Department, Boston University
Offered in: Summer 2012
Syllabus
Article on the course from BU Today

How are we to understand Boston, both as a place with buildings, roads, sewers, statues and the like and a cultural creation, a place with all kinds of different people, institutions, organizations and neighborhoods?  To answer this question students in this course read about the physical and social development of the city and its neighborhoods, the various groups that have settled here, later left and new groups that took their place and how they get along (or don’t). Students visited several neighborhoods, heard from Boston leaders and had an opportunity to do a little historical digging by reading about Boston from old newspaper stories. The course was based upon several overriding themes including Boston’s social history, neighborhood history and change and key issues (race and education among them). Films about Boston were shown and students took several field trips.

Neighborhood Effects and the Social Order of the City
Robert Sampson, Sociology Department, Harvard University
Offered in: Spring 2013

Ideas about order and disorder have driven debates about the city for over a century. After reviewing classic approaches we examine contemporary research on neighborhood inequality, “broken-windows” and crime, racial segregation, influences of ethnic diversity and immigration, urban social networks, the symbolic meanings of disorder, and competing visions for the uses of public space. As part of the curriculum, students conduct field-based observations drawing upon cutting-edge methods employed by urban sociologists to understand the workings of the modern city.

Visualizing and Analyzing Social Patterns in Greater Boston
Dan O'Brien, Sociology Department, Harvard University
Government/Community Partners: City of Boston's Department of Information and Technology, other City agencies
Offered in: Fall 2012
Syllabus

This course introduces students to the skills necessary to work with spatial data, including the use of ArcGIS 10.0 and tools for analyzing spatial statistics. The course focuses on community-level variation in the greater Boston metropolitan area, having students learn while working with current data provided by researchers and City agencies.

Seminar in Urban Sociology: Social Boundaries and Urban Marginalities
Liza Weinstein, Sociology Department, Northeastern University
Offered in: Fall 2012
Syllabus

This urban sociology seminar explores the modern urban experience with a focus on social boundaries--the symbolic and physical walls that ddivide urban space along class lines, and those of race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality. In each section of the course, students apply the topics, themes, and analytical concepts to a specific area of inquiry about the Boston region. Specifics about these "Boston Urban Lab" assignments are provided in the syllabus.

The Sociology of Boston
Catherine S. Bueker, Sociology Department, Emmanuel College
Offered in: Spring 2010
Syllabus

This course was a senior seminar designed to pull together the many sociological theories and concepts covered in various courses, through the prism of Boston.  The overarching question to which students repeatedly returned is whether Boston, Massachusetts could be Any City, U.S.A. From education to politics to sports, students studied various institutions have encouraged, mirrored, and at times, altered the city of Boston, and how the city has altered them. Readings for this course were both theoretical and empirical in nature. Additionally, students went on a series of field trips to various locations tied to the readings and discussions throughout the course of the semester.

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Urban Planning and Design 

Boston Urban Seminar
Don Gillis, Department of City Planning and Urban Affairs, Metropolitan College, Boston University
Offered in: Spring 2012 
Syllabus

How are we to understand Boston, both as a place with buildings, roads, sewers, statues and the like and a cultural creation, a place with all kinds of different people, institutions, organizations and neighborhoods? To answer this question students read about the physical and social development of the city and its neighborhoods, the various groups that have settled here, later left and new groups that took their place and how they get along (or don‘t). Students visited several neighborhoods and had an opportunity to do a little historical digging by reading about Boston from old newspaper stories. The course was based upon several overriding themes including Boston‘s physical (planning) and neighborhood social history.

Enrique Silva, Department of City Planning and Urban Affairs, Metropolitan College, Boston University 
Offered in: Spring 2013

The Boston Urban Symposium will be a thematic Spring symposium, required for students in the City Planning and Urban Affairs programs. The class meetings will weave together the interdisciplinary nature of the urban planning and city planning professions. While the symposium topics will change each spring, professionals and industry leaders will be invited to lecture on their experiences, contemporary challenges to the professions, and major problems confronting the public and private sectors. Recognizing the unique and diverse characteristics of the Boston urban environment, the symposium themes will be drawn from topical issues that involve the greater Boston metropolitan area. The course features a combination of guest speakers and academic case studies that emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of urban planning.   

This course used development in the South Boston Seaport area as an example case for students to learn GIS and to encapsulate their research and design ideas into sharable models that engage the web in many ways. 

This introductory GIS course is focused on Bostno and surrounding towns. All of the weekly labs use a Boston GIS data, which includeds examples of many types of data. As the course unfolds, students engage the Boston-based dataset with a progression of geoprocessing models.

Gateway Cities Field Study
David Barron, Harvard Law School
Ann Forsyth, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Desig
Nicolas Retsinas, Harvard Business School 
Offered in: Spring 2013
Syllabus

In this course, students from Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, teamed up to work on interdisciplinary projects related to the redevelopment in some of greater Boston’s Gateway Cities, former industrial cities that experienced hard economic times but now are receiving renewed attention from policymakers to see how they can be redeveloped to make them important, successful places for the 21st Century. In the course, the student teams partnered with state, local and community representatives to work on specific redevelopment projects and policies.

Intro to Geographical Information Systems for Urban and Environmental Analysis
Barbara Parmenter, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University
Offered in: Fall 2012
Course website

Networked Urbanism
Belinda Tato and Jose Luis Vallejo, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Offered in: Fall 2012
Course description
Course blog

This studio brings an alternative to the traditional way of designing cities from a bird’s eye view, and a single designer’s perspective. It not only examines the physical dimension of the city, but also its social processes.  Participants are challenged to develop designs that reconcile the existing physical conditions -that respond to lifestyles from the past- with the emerging needs of the citizens through network design thinking.  Click here for information about some projects from the 2010 course. 

Planning and the Development Process
John Weis, Department of City Planning and Urban Affairs, Metropolitan College, Boston University
Offered in: Fall 2012
Syllabus
Final Project

This course examines the interface between the private and public sectors in the land development process and the different skills and tools required for each. For their final projects, students had to prepare either a strategic plan for Dudley Square or propose a project for the Blair Lot and former police station in Dudley Square.

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