In this article, “Applying Geography Course Projects to Issues in City Resilience and Global Connectivity” by Ronald V. Kalafsky and Helen M. Rosko, the authors present the findings of a course project for upper-division undergraduates that explored the impact of geography, city resiliency and global connections. One of the missions of the course project was to bring different intellectual perspectives from varying fields and apply found knowledge to real-world problems in an engaging application of geographic knowledge. The students were prompted to analyze many different factors and risks that cities face and use critical geographic planning to best prepare and plan for long term socioeconomic and global impacts. The authors found that creating opportunities for students to think and engage in spatial and geographic terms can lead to an increased interest in geography and geographic impacts such as social welfare and environmental health. Each student was assigned a different global city and engaged in a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to ask central questions to the project including the strengths, weaknesses and global connectivity of a city; whether it benefits from external opportunities/obstacles; the external threats to the city as they relate to global economic networks. I was able to relate this to my topic by looking specifically at the results students found in terms of city resilience in cases of natural hazards and disasters as well as the role of human capital and (inadequate) infrastructure in cities like Dubai, Bristol, and New Orleans. Although the results of the analysis for the related topics focused largely on opportunities for redevelopment in the hopes of designing a “global city” stray from the perspective of my proposed research, it provides an opportunity to gather more organizational and economic data as I explore other sources of information and perspective.

Kalafsky, Ronald V., and Rosko, Helen M. “Applying Geography Course Projects to Issues in City Resilience and Global Connectivity.” Journal of Geography 116, no. 2 (March 4, 2017): 67–78.