This course aims to search the field of culinary culture through daily life and tradition during the Middle Ages. Given that food has always been connected with the economy, religion, medicine, law, and politics, we will examine cuisine and cooking as relevant areas of research to understand life and society during the Middle Ages. We will explore Europe with a particular emphasis on Spain. Since we count on a better number of primary sources, the major focus will be the late Middle Ages (c.1300-1550). As primary sources, we will analyze cookery books, recipe collections, literature, images, legal documents, diaries, and chronicles, among others. To put in context and understand better our primary sources, we learn about celebrations, markets, religion, festivals, taverns, food in towns, villages, and castles. These sources complement each other to build up a portrate of medieval culture and tradition through food.

How do digital versions of historical artifacts change how we understand and work with these artifacts? This course examines premodern texts and archives in the digital age: the aims of building digital collections; the new scholarly approaches that they enable; the preservation, access, and equity questions that they raise and require us to answer responsibly.

This course will explore a topic and/or problem in the history of the art of the Middle Ages, globally envisioned, from late antiquity to the Early Modern period, but not necessarily including the entire breadth of this temporal period. By the design of the instructor, the course may address select developments in medieval art history, such as collecting, patronage, production, and reception of various kinds of art objects. The topical focus of the course might foreground an object type: architecture, manuscripts, metalwork, textiles. The course will examine key sources for its topic and explore its secondary literature, while also guiding students in understanding the larger contexts of its focus.

This course will explore a topic and/or a problem related to manuscript studies and textual cultures of the Middle Ages, globally envisioned, from late antiquity to the Early modern period, but not necessarily including the entire breadth of this temporal period. By the design of the instructor, the course may address select developments in manuscript studies and textual cultures. Some modules might involve the study of sources in their original format, and convey specialized notions in paleography, codicology, and/or book history. The course will examine key sources for its topic and explore its secondary literature, while also guiding students in understanding the larger contexts of its topic.

This course will explore a topic and/or problem related to music of the Middle Ages, globally envisioned, from late antiquity to the early modern period, but not necessarily including the entire breadth of this temporal period. Topics might include, for example, plainchant and polyphony, and/or topics for individual research. The course will examine key sources for its topic and explore its secondary literature, while also guiding students in understanding the larger contexts of its focus.

This course will explore a topic and/or problem related to religion and/or theology of the Middle Ages, globally envisioned, from late antiquity to the early modern period, but not necessarily including the entire breadth of this temporal period. By the design of the instructor, the course may address select developments in medieval religion or theology. The course will examine key sources for its topic and explore its secondary literature, while also guiding students in understanding the larger contexts of its topic.

CMS students may request to complete an individual reading or research course with a faculty member of their choice who must have a graduate faculty (SGS) appointment through CMS. Barring exceptional circumstances, directed reading courses will be authorized only for students in the second year of registration, on topics directly related to their main research areas, and for which CMS or one of the cognate departments has no comparable offering.

The student is responsible for finding a faculty member who is willing to work with the student. (Browse the list of CMS Faculty.) Together they will create the learning goals, deliverables, resources, timeline, and mechanism for feedback. With input from the supervising faculty member, each student will submit the SGS Reading and/or Research Course form along with a brief course outline that includes all of the following: course title (maximum 60 characters) and a paragraph describing the body of work to be studied; learning goals and objectives; required readings (journal articles, book chapters, (non)governmental documents, etc.) necessary to meet learning goals and objectives; assignments with corresponding due dates and relative weights; a statement regarding the penalty for late submission of work; and planned contact with instructor and mechanism for obtaining instructor feedback.

The form and outline should be submitted to the Graduate Administrator, for approval by the PhD Coordinator, at least one week before the sessional deadline to enrol in courses.

CMS students may request to complete an individual reading or research course with a faculty member of their choice who must have a graduate faculty (SGS) appointment through CMS. Barring exceptional circumstances, directed reading courses will be authorized only for students in the second year of registration, on topics directly related to their main research areas, and for which CMS or one of the cognate departments has no comparable offering.

The student is responsible for finding a faculty member who is willing to work with the student. (Browse the list of CMS Faculty.) Together they will create the learning goals, deliverables, resources, timeline, and mechanism for feedback. With input from the supervising faculty member, each student will submit the SGS Reading and/or Research Course form along with a brief course outline that includes all of the following: course title (maximum 60 characters) and a paragraph describing the body of work to be studied; learning goals and objectives; required readings (journal articles, book chapters, (non)governmental documents, etc.) necessary to meet learning goals and objectives; assignments with corresponding due dates and relative weights; a statement regarding the penalty for late submission of work; and planned contact with instructor and mechanism for obtaining instructor feedback.

The form and outline should be submitted to the Graduate Administrator, for approval by the PhD Coordinator, at least one week before the sessional deadline to enrol in courses.

CMS students may request to complete an individual reading or research course with a faculty member of their choice who must have a graduate faculty (SGS) appointment through CMS. Barring exceptional circumstances, directed reading courses will be authorized only for students in the second year of registration, on topics directly related to their main research areas, and for which CMS or one of the cognate departments has no comparable offering.

The student is responsible for finding a faculty member who is willing to work with the student. (Browse the list of CMS Faculty.) Together they will create the learning goals, deliverables, resources, timeline, and mechanism for feedback. With input from the supervising faculty member, each student will submit the SGS Reading and/or Research Course form along with a brief course outline that includes all of the following: course title (maximum 60 characters) and a paragraph describing the body of work to be studied; learning goals and objectives; required readings (journal articles, book chapters, (non) governmental documents, etc.) necessary to meet learning goals and objectives; assignments with corresponding due dates and relative weights; a statement regarding the penalty for late submission of work; and planned contact with instructor and mechanism for obtaining instructor feedback.

The form and outline should be submitted to the Graduate Administrator, for approval by the PhD Coordinator, at least one week before the sessional deadline to enrol in courses.

Urban centres are increasingly an important focal point for industrial innovation and economic development. Globalization, a recognition of the importance of innovation to economic prosperity, the interdependence between knowledge generation, learning, and proximity, and not least, the fragmentation of the innovation process itself, have all helped give rise to new understandings of how urban regions interact with, and support, knowledge-intensive economies. The purpose of this course is to survey the literature on these issues and explore their implications for: the role of strategic management in planning and directing the economic development of city-regions; the role of economic governance in city-regions; and, the relationships that urban centres have with upper-levels of government.

This course provides an overview and critical analysis of core constructs used to understand the role of civic engagement in economic and community development. Beginning with theoretical constructs, policy contexts, and spatial dimensions of community and economic development, we examine the challenges and prospects for meeting both local economic growth and social equity objectives at the local and regional scale. Shifting to the process of engaging the community and broader civic organizations, we examine the methods, strategies and tactics involved, focusing on planning, implementation and management activities. We conclude with an examination of the way new methods of civic engagement are contributing to community and economic development practice and the various approaches and programs offering ‘on the ground’ prospects for integrating community and economic development goals. The primary objective of this course is to encourage students to understand the relationship between the theory, process, and actual practice of community and economic development and to identify key themes, cross-cutting challenges, and opportunities for innovation.

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.

This course explores theories, policies, and institutions related to the social sustainability of cities. Socially sustainable cities integrate urban residents and diverse groups in a just and equitable fashion through investments in community services, educational and employment opportunities, and income supports. In recent decades, the forces of economic globalization, international migration, and labour market restructuring have intensified urban social and spatial divisions, raising complex public management challenges in sustaining equitable and democratic cities. Drawing on inter-disciplinary literature to build an urban political economy framework, the course begins with consideration of the theoretical linkages between the economic and social dimensions of city life. It then examines a range of social sustainability strategies, both national and local, to balance innovation and inclusion. Topics include collaborative governance, community economic development, neighbourhood revitalization, affordable housing and public transit, immigrant settlement, workforce development, and civic engagement and urban social movements. The course concludes with assessment of the organizational challenges and community impacts of different strategies and interventions for social sustainability.

The goal of this course is to develop your political acuity by examining the political forces at work in cities, and the political environment in which urban policy decisions are made. We will accomplish this by introducing you to various theories of urban politics and investigating how these frameworks apply to case studies in different local and national settings. The course is motivated by four fundamental questions: Who holds power in cities? How is this power exercised? What political conflicts does this produce? And how can we explain these conflicts? We will answer these questions mainly using the conceptual tools of political science, which aim to capture the role of organized interests, institutions, and ideas in urban governance, as well as case studies and conversations with urban scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds in cities around the world.

The goal of this course is to better understand how Canadian cities are formally governed — how local and regional governments are structured, what levels of government are responsible for different local services, and how local policy decisions are made, including the municipal budget process. The course is divided in two parts. First, we examine the general features of Canada's system of urban governance — the basic machinery of local government and municipal administration; the mandate and functions of local agencies and regional authorities; and the role of federal and provincial governments in local affairs. Next, we dive deeper into the local policy process, particularly how municipal governments raise and spend money to deliver public services.

This course provides an overview of how the emergence of digital technologies are shaped by, and shaping, cities. Students will use case studies to consider the successes and challenges associated with cities in the digital age. Consideration will be given to issues of governance and equity and the roles of public, private and not-for-profit actors.

This course is meant to provide students with the skills to understand and apply a variety of analytic approaches for regional and community economic development planning. These techniques are used in professional practice to yield information about the behaviour and performance of local economies and to measure the impact of public policy interventions. With an emphasis on the use of case-study examples, the course will provide students with a solid understanding of the range of policy interventions that are used by economic development practitioners; the context and rationale for selection between economic development policy alternatives; and the suitability of policy alternatives at the spatial scale of the city and the region. By the end of the course, students should be able to select techniques appropriate to particular situations and information needs, conduct analyses using these methods, critically evaluate the validity of the analytic results obtained, and interpret and clearly explain the results to policy makers.

This course concerns the formulation of business strategy and the management of business enterprises in rapidly evolving, technology-intensive industries. Examples of such industries include (but are not restricted to) pharmaceuticals, computer hardware and software, aerospace, and telecommunications. These sectors are considered by many to be the principal areas for economic growth in industrialized countries. The primary goal of this course is to develop the participants' understanding of the nature of the forces driving competitive interaction between technology-based firms. The course will examine the logic (or lack thereof) of the policies which shape the environment in which technology intensive industries must compete. Also, we consider the managerial and organizational challenges presented by the technology intensive environment.

Students will be placed with one of the numerous partner organizations for their summer internship. In addition to the experience gained in working on initiatives related to topics in the core program of study, students will be required to produce a brief policy report at the end of the internship that analyzes one of the key policy issues or problems they worked on during their placement in terms of the key theoretical approaches and analytical techniques taught in the core curriculum of the first year.

Main streets, or principal retail corridors, serve as anchors of economic activity, social gathering, and cultural expression in Canada's cities and towns. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, some main streets have struggled to maintain their vitality. Why do some streets thrive while others falter? What is the role of the sectoral composition of businesses, local built form, transportation infrastructure, characteristics of the surrounding residential community, the capacity of local businesses to organize, and/or specific federal, provincial, and local policy interventions?

Industries, sectors, and clusters are a major component of regional and urban economic analysis as well as a key element of economic development strategies. For example, one need only examine the reports from public and private agencies or review the flow of request for proposals by public agencies and non-profit organizations that ask for, or include, sectoral analyses and policy strategies designed to target particular industries. Not coincidentally, much of urban and regional research that seeks to account for the strengths and dynamics of regions brings to bear theories about industrial development, sectoral dynamics, and the roles of particular industries.

This course will provide a foundation for students in the methodological skills as well as substantive issues that may become a basis for economic development or industrial planning, and for project implementation. The seminar has four objectives that are methodological, substantive, and theoretical: 1) to introduce and apply the various methods and procedures of sectoral investigation as applied to regions, industries, companies, and their labor forces; and 2) to investigate the characteristics and trends of particular industry sub-sectors in the specific case of the GTHA, resulting in an industry profile that can serve as an aid to planning and shaping the economic development of communities and the region.

Developed by Professor Michael Porter and the staff and affiliates of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School, this Microeconomics of Competitiveness (MOC) course on competition and economic development addresses the subject from a bottom-up, microeconomic perspective. While sound macroeconomic factors affect the potential for competitiveness, wealth is actually created at the microeconomic level. The MOC course focuses on the sources of national or regional productivity, which are rooted in the strategies and operating practices of locally based firms, the vitality of clusters, and the quality of the business environment in which competition takes place.

The course will start with an overview of recent writings that look at transformative forces related to international trade, corporate restructuring, new skill demands and the implications for labour market performance. It examines how these forces are experienced differently across industries and across socio-economic groups, as well as some of the institutional factors that help to explain widening wage and income disparities in Canada and the U.S. The second half of the course focuses on some of the policy and planning implications of these transformative forces and specifically the role that local practitioners and policy makers can play in addressing sources of socio-economic disparity. Four areas of policy will be considered, including: efforts to link competitiveness-enhancing retraining and industrial/sectoral upgrading initiatives; the creation of innovative new partnerships between employers and labor market intermediaries, such as staffing agencies, labor unions and non-profits; strategies that connect smart-growth and social equity goals; and finally, new forms of labor and community organizing designed to improve workplace justice (e.g., community benefits and living wage movements).

This course provides students with an examination of real estate development from the entrepreneurial and public perspectives. It emphasizes risk management and the inherent uncertainties of development. The four dimensions of real estate are addressed: economic/market, legal/institutional, physical and financial.

Despite all the talk about the "death of distance," geography matters more than ever. Regional differences within many countries have increased in the past decades, and where a person lives today has a very large impact on many aspects of his or her life. This course is a journey through the current economic landscape. We will explore places that are growing and places that are declining. For instance, we will discover why the labor market in New York and Boston has been so much better than the one in Detroit and Cleveland in the past 35 years. The course will investigate the industrial districts of Italy and study how knowledge diffuses among firms located near each other, and the implications for local productivity and innovation. We will study how British and Canadian local labour markets are affected by the fact that certain industries and occupations are dying. We will travel to Africa and discuss the extent to which investment from Asia serves to catalyze economic development in Ethiopia's regional economies. In doing so, we will try to understand the economic forces driving trends in wages, productivity and innovation across cities and regions. These are the forces that will define the geography of future jobs and will shape the economic destiny of local communities around the world.

This reading seminar is devoted to the study of the environmental impacts of (mostly urban) industrialization and to past, current and potentially new ways of analyzing and addressing them. The topics discussed range from the history of deforestation and the creation of recycling linkages between firms to the role of institutions in promoting innovative behaviour and the impact of geographical distance on the sustainability of industrial practices. Unlike many seminars discussing the relationship between economic growth and the environment, the perspective favoured in "Cities, Industry, and the Environment" will be generally optimistic.

For the first time in human history, most people live in cities. Local and regional governments deal with many core issues that affect our daily lives, ranging from economic development and land use planning, to public housing and homelessness, immigrant settlement, and public transit. Yet non-governmental actors such as organized business interests and community based organizations also actively participate in urban politics and policymaking processes. This course examines the political process at the city-region level, exploring patterns of conflict and collaboration among governmental and community-based actors attempting to formulate solutions to complex 21st century urban problems. Using an urban political economy lens that draws attention to how globalization shapes urban fortunes, we examine questions of local political agency, framing out key local government structures and processes as well as major policy issues facing cities in North America and Europe. In particular, we focus on the prospects for policy innovation that integrates urban economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

The metropolitan area — also called the urban region or city-region — is now the dominant form of human settlement. The question of how urban regions should be governed, and of how to plan their future growth, has been hotly debated for over a century with no resolution. This course provides an overview of these issues. It begins with a discussion of what we mean by "region," why the regional scale (as distinct from the national, provincial, or local) is understood to be useful and necessary, and how we should think about governance and policymaking at the regional scale. It then surveys the historical evolution and contemporary relevance of six leading perspectives on regional planning and governance. The course concludes by looking at the prospects for regionalism, with a focus on the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).