Microeconomics for Planners

Planning aims to mitigate and equitably redress crises, challenges, and problems. These challenges are structural. The social structures of race, gender, class, colonialism are determinative of the constraints imposed on individual actors, and upheld by their collected actions. In this course, we will develop a suite of tools from economic theory to understand these mutual processes of individual action and structural constraint. We will build out an understanding of producer theory from the collaborative possibilities and physical constraints that unfold as production is scaled up. We will pursue consumer theory as the process of individuals doing the best for themselves, their families, and their communities—subject to the sociostructural constraints under which they operate. We will apply these tools to sites of human interaction and social decision-making, such as markets. We will consider alternative frameworks of social welfare, with a specific focus on marginalization and crisis. Finally, we will consider common policy interventions, and discuss their implications under different constructions of welfare.

Planning Economics

Planning aims to mitigate and equitably redress crises, challenges, and problems. These challenges are structural. The social structures of race, gender, class, colonialism are determinative of the constraints imposed on individual actors, and reified by their collected actions. In this course, we will use a suite of tools from economic theory to understand these mutual processes of individual action and structural constraint and investigate crises in search of opportunities for mitigation and reparation. We will investigate a variety of crises from throughout the various realms of planning, including (but not limited to): climate change & [in]action, disinvestment & gentrification, autocentricity & other legacies of the built environment, and the poverty driving rapid urbanization and the concomitant under-planning & informal settlement.