Word: crp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics of the program contend that the CRP places undue emphasis upon economic and quantitative analysis. Kilbridge and Kain refute these allegations. Since Kain became department chairman two years ago, the CRP has revised its core curriculum, which now requires seven courses for first-year planning students. Four of these courses--Economic Analysis for Planning, Quantitative Methods for Planners I and II, Public Finance and Budgeting--stress economic or statistical analysis. In addition, first-year students this summer received an introductory welcome letter from the department, suggesting several preparatory texts in statistics and microeconomics. The letter also stressed the importance...
...CRP's critics, including a number of visiting committee members, accept economics as one aspect of planning but they claim that the current program gives short shrift to social, political and physical factors in the planning process. Faculty members who share Kain's viewpoint, many of whom entered the department within the last few years, note that the remaining core courses--Planning Process: Political and Institutional Analysis, Planning Law and Administration and Urban Growth and Spatial Structure--provide students with the necessary foundation in other relevant disciplines, including physical planning. H. James Brown Jr., professor of City Planning, sums...
...Urban Design, says he is "not terribly optimistic" about the AIP's acceptance of the core as a basis for professional education. Vigier, a trained architect and planner, is one of the few faculty members who joined the department before the 1971 modifications began. He says before the CRP curriculum changes, economics was not stressed although students had the option of taking courses in that discipline, as well as other social sciences, in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He terms more than half the "real life" problem-solving workshops as "quite odd" or only peripherally related to planning...
Vigier believes that the current CRP program "speaks to urban phenomena but not to planners"--it addresses part, but not all, of what a planner needs to know. If the CRP is actually closer to an urban economics program than to a professional training school, it does not clearly belong in the Design School, he says. In fact, he says that "we might as well be in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences or in Timbuktu, for that matter...
...visiting committee showed less concern with the absolute size of the faculty and focused instead on the teacher's academic orientation. One planner, familiar with the Harvard CRP, says Kain recruited an excessive number of economists. In fact, out of the eight academic appointments he had made in the past two years, four of the department's newcomers are economists and a fifth has a joint law and economics degree...