This course will introduce students to the field of urban and regional economic development theory. Course material will introduce students to the analysis of spatial economic processes at various geographic scales and explain how broader economic processes, including international trade and investment, financial flows, the impact of industrial structures and the ongoing processes of economic restructuring on a global scale, exert an impact on the trajectories of local economic development. The course will introduce students to current debates in economic development, their policy implications and how they are applied to issues of urban and regional growth and decline. It will also examine how the emergence of new problems in economic development, such as globalization, outsourcing, the rise of the "new competition" and the need for regions and localities to prosper in a global economy that is vastly more integrated today than in the past. A theoretical and conceptual introduction to these processes will help students understand important differences in how communities are shaped and constrained by these broader forces in developing and implementing economic development strategies and what these differences might imply for long-term policy reach and impact.