Chad Frederick, Assistant Professor of Geography & Sustainable Planning, was interested in coming to GVSU in part because of the emphasis on sustainability and not what is often just referred to as urban planning.  Don’t get him wrong—his Master’s is in urban planning—but his interdisciplinary approach is grounded in a scientific paradigm of sustainable planning that continues to evolving beyond just a “triple bottom line” approach that was touted a few years ago into something better that has the environment at its center.

“It’s the difference between a Venn diagram and an Euler diagram,” Chad clarifies. For those a little rusty on the distinction, a Venn diagram can represent all the possible combinations, while the Euler sticks to those represented in the real world.

His particular research passion is on mobility inside cities.  What is it?  What do they do? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions?  How do they interact?  To have such an interest is necessarily to embrace complexity. As his website profile reads, his interest include: Urban Geography, Multimodality, Spatial Inequalities, Medium-size Cities, Urban-Rural Relationships, Bioregionalism, Quantitative Methods, Sustainability Theory, Urban Agrarianism, Education for Sustainable Development.

When Chad thinks about how a student here might approach learning about the workings of cities, he notes that there are currently about a dozen courses in disparate departments that have cities as their focus. “But there is no class called ‘Cities—what do they do?’”

He can certainly envision it though.  It would be a transdisciplinary course with a different speaker each week that, while including disciplines such as engineering, would be convened by CLAS where disciplines such as GPY and HST reside.  Students would have a great framework for disciplinary understanding as they learned how each discipline approached urban issues.

“I’d be willing to facilitate it all.  It could be Gen Ed, display lots of disciplines, help exploratory study students pick majors,” Chad notes.  He even sees this as an opportunity to have a really large lecture with lots of “turn to your neighbor” interaction, demonstration of geometric progression, pluralism, and dividing the class into four to show how certain kinds of information disseminates.  “We could show students what a hundred people look like.  It would be very visual,” Chad says with more enthusiasm for the large scale than some might have.  “Different tools, lots of Deweyan things you could do with your neighbor or the person behind you to see how ideas permeate.  Fun, engaging interaction.”

Chad is clearly pretty comfortable with the notion of filling the largest hall on campus and quickly reminds us that we are now an urban planet, noting that 80% of us live in urban areas.

“Yes, the way I teach is a little shocking to students at first.  Education for sustainable development is very student-centered and involves problem-solving, interdisciplinarity, and is quite exploratory.  They learn from themselves as much as from me.  They learn about research but also how it plays out in the world.  They are a little surprised to see me accept what I don’t know and that helps demonstrate the framework of knowledge as necessarily interdisciplinary.  They help me write the exam questions, they pick the city to examine.”  He notes that this approach is not theory heavy and that it is not a linear progression, but is instead more modular.  “Having no necessary starting place can be a little unnerving, so I often ‘put a pin in it’ to show that knowledge is not necessarily linear and that we may come to the relevance of a particular point later—or not.  They find this a little strange, but by the end they get it.”

His comfort with this sort of uncertainty has been coming in handy in his own life.  He moved out of an Airbnb and into a home after classes began last fall and that was not his only move that summer.  He explains that he survived this frenetic start to his new job at GVSU.

This term he has some courses that are an open, seminar sort of style that many students have not before experienced.  “They use their diversity as an important systems property.  It’s another tool that students should be exposed to.  They can explore their natural inclinations, and it’s fun.  And it makes me fresh and sharp and keeps me out of ruts.”

Chad finishes the interview describing a 60-100 word essay assignment he gives.  The middle length takes more care and disincentivizes wandering. 

“There is no skirting the question,” Chad concludes, “and that’s another tool in the Tweet Age.”