Courses offered by members of the Urban Sustainability Research Group at the University of Michigan.
Curricular innovation
Professor Newell co-founded the University of Michigan Minor in Sustainability in 2012, designing its interdisciplinary curriculum and governance structure, and has taught its foundational course since its creation.
He was a co-investigator on Transforming Sustainability Education and Case-Based Teaching, a $1,595,749 initiative spanning seventeen faculty from 2015 to 2019 to expand case-based learning across the school.
From 2014 to 2020 he led year-long Rackham-funded interdisciplinary seminars on sustainability and resilience for doctoral students from across the university, meeting biweekly to discuss readings, share manuscripts, and host external scholars, with each year culminating in a two-day writing retreat. Doctoral students from that seminar founded the Michigan University-wide Sustainability and Environment initiative in 2015, which continues to run an annual conference and workshop. Mentorship of the seminar has since passed to Drew Gronewold.
Courses
EAS 501.037: Sustainability and Supply Chains (graduate)
Instructor: Joshua Newell
A study of how everyday things, the food we consume, the clothes we wear, the furniture we sit on, intertwine urban dwellers with distant people, places, and spaces. The course provides theoretical and methodological approaches to understand how supply chains and networks are perpetually reconfigured by processes of globalization and deglobalization, and the role of corporations, nation-states, labour, non-governmental organizations, and consumers.
It examines efforts to make supply chains more sustainable, resilient, and humane. Students learn the skills necessary to track the origin of products through the supply chain, along with methods and practices to calculate the carbon footprint of corporate supply chains, particularly Scope 3 emissions.
Offered: Fall 2026.
ENVIRON 207: Sustainability and Society (undergraduate)
Instructor: Joshua Newell. Foundational course for the University of Michigan Minor in Sustainability.
Sustainability has become perhaps the most pressing scientific and social challenge of our time. Typically defined as using natural resources so as to create a high quality of life for future as well as current generations, the idea of sustainability has been strongly contested since its introduction to popular discourse in the 1980s. Global climate change, habitat and biodiversity loss, desertification and deforestation, and the effects of rapid urbanization have fuelled political debates over sustainability policy in both industrialized and industrializing countries and regions.
In this course you will gain an understanding of how key global challenges, such as population growth and consumption, are creating a sense of urgency around developing and promoting theories, methods, and practices that foster sustainability in our society. Through concentrated study of this emerging sphere you will learn to articulate the relationships among observed phenomena and the principles and policies those observations can inform, particularly how best to integrate technology, education, and policy to meet identified goals.
The course is divided into four interdependent modules: concepts and contexts for sustainability; challenges of a planet; the global economy and the search for solutions; and social activism and change agents. In addition to two weekly lectures and discussion sections, the course has an experiential component consisting of field trips and in-class exercises, including an annual tour of the University of Michigan campus where sustainability staff illustrate efforts to improve energy efficiency, food sourcing, and walkability. Guest presenters include officials from the City of Ann Arbor sustainability office, non-governmental organizations, and environmental justice and food activists.
Students in a recent offering came from eighteen different majors. Annual enrolment is approximately 75.
Offered: Fall 2026, Fall 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014, Winter 2014, Winter 2013, Winter 2012.
Past courses
EAS 537: Urban Sustainability (graduate)
Instructor: Joshua Newell. Lecturer: Brandon Finn. Introduced to the SEAS curriculum in 2014.
As engines of capital accumulation, cities have often been viewed as environmental sacrifice zones. Some critics have argued that sustainable cities is an oxymoron. Nonetheless, the debate over sustainable development generally, and sustainable urbanism specifically, has succeeded in reshaping and broadening discourse around cities and attendant policies and outcomes, in both industrialized and industrializing countries. The notion of sustainability has led away from narrower conceptions of urban environmentalism toward greater integration of social and economic goals with environmental and ecological objectives, and a fundamental rethinking of how cities should be theorized, planned, and managed.
This course introduces graduate students to the field of urban sustainability from multiple disciplinary perspectives, primarily industrial ecology, urban political ecology, urban ecology, and planning. It provides the theoretical and methodological tools to explore the potential for a sustainable urbanism. Approaches to foster more sustainable and resilient forms of urbanization, ranging from localization to industrial symbiosis to ecological restoration, are introduced and evaluated.
Skill building focuses on the needs of professional master’s students, including sustainability and resilience indicators and metrics, material flow analysis, and specialized software for social and spatial analysis. Course deliverables include a group case project and a material flow analysis project. Meetings with stakeholders and other actors who shape the city form additional course components.
The course incorporates multimedia case-based and experiential learning. With students and colleagues, Professor Newell developed a sustainability case on urban farming in Detroit, published in Case Studies in the Environment, which now serves as a model for students who collaboratively develop their own multimedia cases on urban green space, water and waste flows, transportation, and urban form.
Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Fall 2014. Previously offered as NRE 501.037 in Fall 2014 and Fall 2015.
NRE 580: Environmental Assessment (graduate core)
Lead instructor: Joshua Newell, with module leaders Dave Allan, Gregory Keoleian, Joan Nassauer, Donald Scavia, and David Anthoff.
Professor Newell directed the school’s largest required master’s course, enrolling up to 169 students, and led its redesign to a faculty-led modular format.
Offered: Winter 2013, Winter 2012, Winter 2011.
Previously at the University of Southern California
Sustainability Science and Society (undergraduate), Sustainable Cities (graduate), Research Methods in Geography (graduate), and Food, Fashion and Furniture: Commodities in the Global Economy (graduate), 2007 to 2010.
Master’s project advising
- Scaling Up Agriculture in Los Angeles for Equity and Sustainability, 2022 to 2023
- Green Infrastructure Analysis, Design, and Application in Detroit’s Lower East Side, 2012 to 2013
- Michigan Green Communities Challenge, 2012 to 2013
- Sustainable Huron-Clinton Metroparks, 2011 to 2012