Prerequisites:  Open to upper level undergraduate and graduate students.  While preference given to Planning students, students from other disciplines are welcome.  GIS experience or coursework highly desired.

Course Description: 
General--As a planning application course the major focus will be applying GIS methods to current planning problems with the aim of preparing a professional product in a workshop setting.  The first third of the course reviews and extends core principles of geographic analysis and modeling as expressed in GIS technology and background research into the planning issue.  The latter two thirds of the course will be devoted to collaborative teamwork to define, structure, analyze, and present the resolution of a planning problem posed by a “client”.  These problems will have at their core a strong spatial component that will require detailed data assembly, analysis, modeling and presentation techniques common to Geographic Information Systems.

Specific—How healthy is our community when viewed from the perspective of Intergenerational Complementarities?   How livable is Charlottesville/Albemarle for the senior population? Is it becoming more livable?  The Jefferson Area Board of Aging (JABA) is interested in exploring the connections between these two questions.

Rather than take a programmatic planning approach (transportation services, health services or employment) or a market planning approach (land use or housing), taking a broad view of how a community works when viewed through the experience of specific populations helps articulate some of the key relationships between housing, activities, employment, transportation and services.  In past semesters students have focused on Seniors and then on “persons with disabilities”. 

This semester we will examine another “less than independent” population—youth.  We will also look at how these three groups, but in particular the seniors and youth, have complementary needs and activities. 

One motivation for this activity is the desire of JABA to produce an annual or bi-annual “State of Community Report” from the perspective of the senior population.  Is there a set of protocols that can be developed that will enable a citizen taskforce to monitor the progress in making our community more livable?  How can demographics, environmental quality, and human service activities be measured and displayed to show such progress?  These planning questions will be at the heart of the course.

Pedagogical Intentions:  Planning problems and plan-making have a dual focus on people and place.  The former bring values, aspirations, expectations and capacities to the situation.  Future populations are not yet present.  The place dimension focuses on spatial resources and spatial interaction.  Modeling these components require creative and systematic thinking.  Geographic Information Systems represent both a science and a technology for addressing these.  Yet, any science or technology is socially derived and limiting.  While the major focus of the course is addressing planning issues, the reflective nature of structuring problems, finding useful data and appropriating productive tools will help highlight the limitations as well as the power of GIS technology. 

Geographic Information Systems are themselves complex blending of people, data, software, hardware and procedures.  Therefore the planning and management of the projects themselves becomes as much a subject of theory and praxis as the topic of the project.  Clear professional communication to different audiences often involved in planning will also receive emphasis.

GIS technology is becoming “object oriented” in concept and implementation.  The “object-oriented” paradigm will serve as an organizing device for understanding both the technology and the project subject matter.

Requirements: 
Individual students will be evaluated on their acquisition of basic skills and on their individual reflection on their work.  This will be evaluated by means of an individual portfolio of products and reflective memoranda. 30%

Student work on projects will require teamwork.  Evaluation will be on both the quality of the product and the quality of the production.  .   70%
 
(Collaborative participation will be explicitly assessed and deficiency could count for as much as 15% of the course grade.)