Environmental Management Practicum: Brownfield Redevelopment
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this practicum built around a real former industrial site, where students work directly with a community client to shape redevelopment decisions. The course pairs fieldwork on location and in the surrounding neighborhood with classroom sessions where students analyze contamination data, regulatory constraints, and economic feasibility to generate practical redevelopment scenarios. Students grapple with how brownfield status, community preferences, and market realities interact, producing recommendations meant to inform actual decision-making rather than a hypothetical exercise. Materials include the syllabus, assignment descriptions, and case documentation as published by MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The course is free to access through MIT OpenCourseWare, with no certificate offered, following MIT's standard open-access model for its course materials.