Public Policy Research
Optional Courses
Students enrolled on the MRes Urban Research can choose from a range of optional courses to make up their required credits.
These include a range of advanced methods courses offered through the Graduate School or a range of substantive courses offered in Urban Studies. Students may also be able to take courses from other subject areas within the College in discussion with the Programme Director.
Optional courses offered through Urban Studies include:
Regenerating Cities: Strategies and Evaluation
This course provides an overview of the development, delivery and impact of regeneration strategies. It explores the challenges of achieving effective regeneration in UK cities in the context of global change and competition, while also considering experiences in North American and Europe. It focuses on strategies at the city, regional and area levels, rather than on those for neighbourhoods. The course also provides an introduction to the issues involved in assessing the effectiveness of regeneration.
Economic Development and Employment
The course aims to explore the different ways of increasing economic development at the regional and local levels, including their rationale and practical application. It examines some of the tensions and trade-offs involved, including how best to enhance city and regional competitiveness; increase productivity and the employment rate, and strike the right balance between inward investment and endogenous growth.
Sustainable Housing Development
The aim of this course is to evaluate what is meant by sustainable housing development and explore the process by which it is most likely to be delivered. The course therefore seeks to integrate consideration of a range of housing design, development and management issues, with an equal emphasis given to private and social housing.
Public Policy and Fiscal Austerity
Public Policy and Fiscal Austerity aims to provide a wide-ranging introduction to issues in contemporary public finance and sets public finance in its long term and international context. The course will identify and assess the drivers of financial policy change, it will evaluate the impact of redistributional policy in the round, provide an overview key cross-cutting themes in public finance policy, and, apply these ideas to a series of welfare state case studies. The disitnctive feature of the course is that it assesses the significance of the credit crunch and fiscal austerity for welfare policy in the UK and locates contemporary public policies in a coherent financial framework.
The aim of this course is to introduce participants to different approaches to the evaluation of public policies and programmes, the strengths and weaknesses of each and to provide an understanding of why different approaches may be more or less suitable in different circumstances. The course will not make participants into expert evaluation practitioners, but it should help them to be more informed users and commissioners of evaluations.
Re-making Urban Neighbourhoods
Urban neighbourhoods are constantly being made and re-made in an ongoing process of urban development and change. The focus of this course is on the neighbourhoods which seem to fare worst out of this process: neighbourhoods of concentrated disadvantage. The aim of this course is to provide an overview of current debates and policies concerned with the re-making of such neighbourhoods. It offers a contemporary take on an age old phenomenon, pointing to the range of ways in which poor neighbourhoods can be re-made: physically, socially and economically