Transformation at the Urban Edge:
Urbanization in Exurbia
Seminar in Housing
City and Regional Planning 816 (3 credit hours)

Hazel A. Morrow-Jones
morrow-jones.1@osu.edu
Ohio State University
City and Regional Planning
Knowlton School of Architecture
Columbus, Ohio, USA

Summer 2000
More Columbus-Dresden syllabi

SYLLABUS
Course Topic | Evaluation Paper | Grading

    Instructors:
  • Hazel A. Morrow-Jones (Ohio State University)
    voice: (614) 292-1027; fax: (614) 292-7106
  • Assistant Professor Maria Manta Conroy
  • Professor Dale Bertsch (Technical University, Dresden)
  • Planning Division of the City of Columbus
  • Planning Department of City of Dresden
  • and many others

Course Home Page: http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/dresden/

COURSE TOPIC
The specific topic of this year's sustainable urban development seminar is Transformation at the Urban Edge: Urbanization in Exurbia. We will define “urban edge” broadly to include the places where the city edge has been over time.

The prerequisite for this course is participation in the spring quarter course, City and Regional Planning 815 (CRP 815), "Case Studies in Housing." That class worked cooperatively with a German class from the Technical University of Dresden and we visited Dresden for two weeks in June. The primary class activity for this course is to plan and run the return visit of the German students in August.

We have several tasks to accomplish. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):

  • Preparing the itinerary and all the logistics for the German class's visit to the U.S. in August.

  • Preparing a set of materials to give the German students about their itinerary
    • .
  • Continuing the work on group papers and individual journals that you began in CRP 815.

  • Rereading some of the materials from spring quarter in light of what you learned in Germany.

  • Reading some new material.

  • Each person will write a paper evaluating the exchange class with specific examples of things that worked, did not work, and suggested changes.
For background information on Columbus and Dresden, see:
Americanization of German Cities: Case Studies in Housing (1998)


EVALUATION PAPER
You could write the evaluation paper entirely from your own experience, or if you want to try it from a more research-oriented perspective, you could write it as an analysis based on academic literature. For example,

  • You could read some work on planning education and evaluate the class in light of what that the literature says planners need to learn.


  • Or you could read about international education in American universities and examine the class in terms of those criteria.


  • Or you could find some literature about technology-mediated learning (the current buzzword for what we did in spring quarter) and analyze the class from the perspective of that literature.
In all three of these examples I can give you some literature to use as a starting point. The kind of paper you choose to write will determine the length. The more challenge you take on the more flexible I will be in the grading. Please note: you will not get a good or bad grade based on whether you say flattering or unflattering things about the class (respectively). The grade will be based on the clarity, completeness, and thoughtfulness of what you write. Specifics are absolutely required (though you can keep some things anonymous to protect individuals). Please keep in mind also that some things are out of my control – feel free to mention them anyway, but remember that I may not be able to do anything.

GRADING
Grades for the course will be based on the following assignments:

40% - Planning/logistics/participation
20% - Posters
40% - Individual papers

NOTE
This international exchange course is co-taught at Ohio State University (Columbus) and Technical University (Dresden), but the information in this syllabus applies to the Ohio State University students. These are the H-Urban versions of this course (The 1998 syllabus contains details of the Dresden and Columbus trips):

For a complete look at the images, posters, and updates that accompany the syllabi for this course, see the OSU web site at http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/dresden/.

See also the Comments by Morrow-Jones on teaching these courses.

Note: Conference papers on teaching these courses were presented by the instructors at the international planning meeting in Shanghai (Summer, 2001) and at an invitational conference in Indiana on technology and international education (October, 2002).



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Syllabus prepared for the H-Urban Syllabus Archive 20 November 2002;
updated 14 October 2004.