Northeastern Voice

Students to explore what makes Boston Boston

Boston’s “triple revolution” — demographics, industrial and spatial changes — is at issue in a new seminar course on public policy taught by School of Social Science, Public Policy and Urban Affairs Dean Barry Bluestone and Boston Foundation President Paul Grogan.

The duo will focus on the economic, social and political dynamics of central cities like Boston, and focus on key factors of economic health, including education, housing, urban crime and health care.

The class kicked off Jan. 7 with an opening lecture on what makes a city a city. Other topics of discussion will include urban sustainability, transportation, housing, public policies to create competitive advantage, land use and zoning regulations, urban and neighborhood safety and civic engagement.

Bluestone and Grogan, who have worked on housing policy initiatives in Boston for many years, offer deeper insights on the critical challenges facing U.S. cities today, and the range of approaches being taken to meet them.

What’s happening in Greater Boston serves as the locus for many issues covered in this graduate-level class, which meets Mondays at 6:30 p.m. in 215 Shillman Hall. Classes may be audited free of charge.

In draft chapters of forthcoming Oxford University Press textbook, which Bluestone is coauthoring, he describes the importance of where we live. “Place matters. Whether it’s the exhilaration some of us feel when the hometown team wins the big game, or the desire to escape our surroundings and seek our fortune elsewhere (or, paradoxically, the ability to feel both sentiments simultaneously), we care passionately about the places where we live,” he wrote.

He added: “Even when we choose to leave the places where we grew up, we are often nostalgic for ‘the old neighborhood’ or ‘the old country.’ We carry our origins with us even as we reinvent ourselves, crafting lives that are different from those of our parents or grandparents.”

The wonders and paradox of urban life is explored in both the class and the new book “The Urban Experience: Economics, Society and Public Policy.” Coauthors are Mary Huff Stevenson and Russell Williams, senior research fellows at the Center for Urban and Regional Policy, which Bluestone directs.

— Susan Salk