ANDY HONG

Curriculum Development

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• Healthy and Sustainable Cities

  • Expected structure: intermediate, 30-50 students

  • Prerequisites: none

  • This course will examine the relationship between the built environment and public health issues. I will cover various topics about the current problems of urban form and automobile dependency, physical activity, environmental pollution, access to sustainable food systems, and health impact assessment. Throughout the course, students will explore how the physical and social characteristics of a neighborhood and transport system can influence the residents through readings, professional deliverables, and guest lectures by planning and public health professionals. Other topics explored include health co-benefits of sustainable development, socioeconomic factors that affect residential location and travel behavior, and the totality of environmental exposure that affects population-level health. By the end of the course, students should have a good grasp of theories and methodologies used in neighborhood research, epidemiology, and public health. In addition students will have an overview of current efforts to promote healthy living through urban and regional planning.

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• Social and Spatial Determinants of Health 

  • Expected structure: advanced, 20-30 students, Lab work required

  • Prerequisites: basic knowledge in epidemiology and GIS

  • Health is intricately linked to where you live and how you interact with other people. The genetic make-up of individual predetermines your health status in the beginning, but what matters more is the environment, both physical and social, that you are exposed to over a lifetime of daily living and working. This course is the introduction to the field of medical geography with health and health care issues from the perspective of spatial and human ecological processes.  The course will explore some of the fundamental issues of medical geography and cover some basics of epidemiology, which is fundamental to understanding the human-environment interactions that influence health outcomes. The course will also teach you some methods of geographic inquiry, including details of health measurement at the individual and ecological scales and basic research design. Lastly, the course will cover some of the key issues in neighborhood health as well as the patterning of health inequalities at the varying geographical scales. 

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• Urban and Regional Transportation Planning

  • Expected structure: intermediate, 40 students

  • Prerequisites: none

  • The course will explore the connection between the built environment and transportation. For the early part of this course, I will examine various issues and problems with the current built environment and transportation system, and review some of the early effort to address these issues. I will then provide an overview of various theories in land use and transportation planning, and how they have evolved and contributed to the development of contemporary planning paradigm. The later part of the course will focus on examining important cases and examples that present both opportunities and challenges for the integrated approach in land use and transportation. Topics will include current issues with federal transportation bills and the recent effort to create a partnership across multiple sectors. Through individual essays and group projects, students will be equipped with core theories and knowledge to embark on their final projects. By the end of this course, students will have a better understanding of the integrated approaches to land use and planning, and be able to understand how to apply them into planning practice.

• Urban Big Data Analysis

  • Expected structure: advanced, 20 students, Lab work required

  • Prerequisites: basic knowledge in programming with R

  • With the advent of open data movement, knowledge and skills for collecting and analyzing big data become increasingly important for urban planners. This course will teach students how to harness the power of big data by mastering the way they are collected, organized, and analyzed to support better decision making in urban planning context. Students will learn the basic tools needed to manipulate large datasets derived from various open-data platforms, from data collection to storage and approaches to analysis. Students will be able to capture and build data structures, perform basic queries in order to extract key metrics and insights. In addition, students will learn how to use various data analytic tools, such as Tableau and Exploratory, to analyze and visualize data. The course will also give students some exposure to statistical programming with R, and introduce them to basic machine learning techniques.

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