GEOG 4250

Planning for the future requires us to be forward thinking: to take stock of current conditions, identify trends, project future directions, and develop scenarios and strategies to achieve our goals. In this course, students will explore significant political, cultural, socioeconomic, technological, and environmental developments shaping places and communities at varying scales, from the local to the global. They will critically examine a variety of place- and community-oriented future scenarios and consider how these are deployed for diverse planning and sociopolitical purposes. Students will learn a variety of forecasting and scenario-building methods, apply these to simulate possible futures for a select place/community, and formulate plans based on these projections.