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This course examines the theories and policy debates over who can own real property, how to communicate and enforce property rights, and the range of liberties that they confer. It explores alternative economic, political, and sociological perspectives of property rights and their policy and planning implications.

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A truly inter-disciplinary course, Housing and Land Use in Rapidly Urbanizing Regions reviews how law, economics, sociology, political science, and planning conceptualize urban land and property rights and uses cases to discuss what these different lenses illuminate and obscure. It also looks at how the social sciences might be informed by how design, cartography, and visual studies conceptualize space's physicality. This year's topics include land trusts for affordable housing, mixed-use in public space, and critical cartography.

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This course covers techniques of financial analysis of investment expenditures as well as the economic and distributive appraisal of those projects. The course gives special consideration to cases in the developing world. Students will engage in a critical analysis of these tools and their role in the political economy of international development. The course will cover topics such as alternative planning strategies for conditions of uncertainty; organizations and project cycle management; the political environment; and interactions of clients and advisers, engineers, planners, policy analysts, and other professionals. Introductory micro-economics is a pre-requisite for this course.

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This readings-based course analyzes the structure and operation of government systems in developing countries, with particular emphasis on regional and local governments. Major topics include: the role of decentralization in national economic reform programs, the potential impact of decentralized governments on local economic development, determination of optimal arrangements for sharing fiscal responsibilities among levels of government, evaluation of local revenue and expenditure decisions, and assessment of prospects and options for intergovernmental fiscal reform. Emphasis is on basic economic concerns, with consideration given to political, institutional, and cultural factors.

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During the last fifteen years, nations across the globe embarked on a historic transformation away from centrally planned economies to market-oriented ones. However, in the common pursuit for economic growth, these transition countries implemented widely different reform strategies with mixed results. With over a decade of empirical evidence now available, this new course examines this phenomenon that has pushed the discourse in a number of disciplines, requiring us to reconsider fundamental issues such as: 1. the proper relationship between business, government, and the public interest 2. the possible synergies and tensions between economic growth and equity 3. how economic transition has reshaped cities The premise of the course is that the core issue in transition involves institution-building and re-building in different contexts.