2024-2025 Academic Catalog 
    
    Nov 21, 2024  
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2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Urban Studies Concentration

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Overview

Undergraduate Concentration

Urbanization has been one of the most powerful processes shaping the world; economically, culturally, geographically, and socially.  The Urban Studies concentration offers students majoring in any field with a multi-disciplinary way to understand the “urban” and to think about cities as vital sites of human experience and innovation. At Clark we emphasize the explicit social, economic, environmental, and political challenges to the conditions of life and social relations in cities, which orient to creating societal change. We also encourage students to explore the artistic, humanistic ways people live in cities. The courses making up the concentration, therefore, expose students to a variety of ways that we observe, work, and feel cities, and to consider what produces cities and their broader environments. Urban Studies offers an exposure to a variety of disciplinary practices in understanding and analyzing cities which is compatible with any major. Urban issues span across a broad range of subjects, making the UDSC concentration as beneficial to a Biology major as it is to a Political Science or Studio Art major.  Depending on the Student’s major, the Urban Studies Concentration fosters a path to Clark’s many Advanced Degree Programs (ADP), notably and most particularly, the Community Development and Planning Master’s degree in SSJ.

 

For more information, please visit the Urban Studies website.

 

Concentration Requirements

  • Students must take a minimum of seven courses in the concentration, including the capstone project.
  • The seven courses must come from three or more different departments.
  • One of these courses, which should be taken at the outset, must be an introductory/gateway course selected from Group A.
  • One of these courses must be a research methods course, which should be taken as early as possible, selected from Group B.
  • At least four additional courses focusing on U.S. cities must be taken (from A, B and/or C categories.) At least two of these courses must be at the 200 level.
  • One of the seven courses must include a culminating capstone experience, consisting of a research or internship project, done either as part of an urban-research or internship seminar or as a directed project supervised by a core faculty adviser or a participating faculty member in the urban studies concentration.
  • No more than two courses in the concentration can also be used to satisfy the requirements of a major, minor or other concentration (excluding courses required for the major).

Students pursuing the concentration will receive advice from one of the core faculty advisers on selecting appropriate courses for the concentration.

Courses

Group A: Introductory Courses (1 required)

Group B: Urban Research Tools & Practice (1 required)

 ”students may count only one of ECON 160, GEOG 110, PSCI 107, and SOC 206; these courses cover similar material”

Group C: Urban Electives (at least 2 required.)

(**) indicates that the course may be used to fulfill the capstone requirement

Program Faculty

Asha Best, Ph.D.
Mark Davidson, Ph.D.
Jack Delehanty, Ph.D.
John Garton, Ph.D.
Jacqueline Geoghegan, Ph.D.
Deborah Martin, Ph.D.
Deborah Merrill, Ph.D.
Sarah Michaels, Ph.D.
James T. Murphy, Ph.D.

Gil Pontius, Ph.D.
Amy Richter, Ph.D.
Laurie Ross, Ph.D.
Rhys Townsend, Ph.D.
Kristina Wilson, Ph.D.
Junfu Zhang, Ph.D.

 

Core Faculty

Ramon Borges-Mendez, Ph.D., Program Coordinator
Mark Davidson, Ph.D.
Deborah Martin, Ph.D.
Amy Richter, Ph.D.
Laurie Ross, Ph.D.

Courses

Courses offered within the last 2 Academic Years

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