“The Philadelphia Center faculty and staff provided me with the steady support I needed to function in a drastically new environment, while simultaneously pushing me to see the world through a wider lens. The confidence I gained through my experiences in Philadelphia allowed me to overcome my fear of the unknown—opening wide the doors of the world.”
Abigail Stonerook, Kalamazoo College
Fall 2004
Women Organized Against Rape, Crisis Intervention Intern
Electives
Economic Perspective on Modern Urban Issues
This course applies economic theory to urban issues. We will try to discuss applications related to the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. Urban Economics is the discipline that lies at the intersection of geography and economics. The course incorporates the remarkable progress in the field of urban economics from the last fifteen years. It also explores the location decisions of utility-maximizing households and profit-maximizing firms, and it shows how these decisions cause the formation of cities of different size and shape.
The course will run as a seminar divided into six sections:
•why cities exist and what causes them to grow or shrink.
•examines the market forces that shape cities and the role of government in determining land-use patterns.
•looks at the urban transportation system.
•uses a model of the rational criminal to explore the causes of urban crime and its spatial consequences.
•explains the unique features of the housing market and examines the effects of government housing policies.
•explains the rationale for U.S.A.’s fragmented system of local government and explores the responses of local governments to intergovernmental grants and the responses of taxpayers to local to local taxes.