I think the first thing you need to know is what Urban Studies actually is and if it’s what you actually want to do. I say this because after I took UBST201, now 253, I knew I wanted to become an urban planner and I switched into the Urban Studies program thinking that was probably the best way to go. After taking a bunch of urban geography, sociology, and anthropology courses that have pretty much gone over the same material but with a different focus, I’ve realized that I have a broad knowledge of all things urban that will very much help me when I become a planner, but that’s going to take a while. Although I chose a good path that is providing me with a wide array of skills, I didn’t choose the most direct path. Ryerson’s site gave me the best break down of what I got myself into:
Urban studies look at cities, people, and processes occurring within cities, but it does not have an action orientation as in planning.
If you just want to study the urban realm looking at what goes on, has gone on and will go on in cities, as well as why, then urban studies is the program for you. If you want to become a planner and would like to do so quickly/directly then you might want to look into planning programs at other universities, off the top of my mind Ryerson and Waterloo offer bachelors of planning. If you want to become a planner with well rounded knowledge of urbanity and don’t mind taking it slow, a BA in urban studies and a masters in planning might be for you.
Now, a little about the Urban Studies program at the U. Like Boris said earlier, a lot of your course will not be Urban Studies course but rather geography, sociology, and anthropology. The UBST program is quite small and has a limited amount of UBST courses, this leads to two major piss-offs:
1) You are at the mercy of other faculties most of the time. Aside from geography you’ll probably have a helluva time trying to get into senior level courses that you’ll need as core subjects. This has led me to changing my path at least once a semester.
2) Overlay, get ready for a lot of this. Since you are taking the urban side of a variety of subjects you are going to hear a lot of the basics of the urban realm repeated. This does make the courses easier but annoying at the same time, you might skip class thinking it’s about the same shit you heard the semester before but the bloody bastard of a prof sneaks some new material in there!
Aside from this stuff the Urban Studies program is really interesting and enlightening. Although it’s going to take me forever to become a planner I’m confident that this program has provided me with a well rounded knowledge that will probably give me an edge later on. For example, I’ve taken a shit load of sociology courses so I now have a sound knowledge of how people interact. This has made me very sensitive to the relationships that planning affects, I’ve come to believe that design can foster interaction. This leads me to what The Geographer was talking about, choose courses that will help you out later on and also interest you. He/she mentioned GIS and quantitative geography courses.
Although GIS is a big part of Urban Planning, I hate it! Instead of GIS I have opted to take an analytical methods (spatial statistics analysis) course in geography and two courses in social research methods. These have been immensely helpful in understanding how other researchers have come to their conclusions and where they may have fallen short.
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