Negotiation and Conflict Resolution

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the theory and practice of negotiation, conflict resolution and community engagement. We will start by looking at basic approaches to interpersonal negotiation and then move to considering contemporary approaches to understanding and addressing public disputes using negotiation, facilitation and public involvement. Design professionals - architects, construction managers, planners and others - face a variety of kinds of problems and challenges in their work. Some problems and challenges, whether simple or complex, are amenable to technical solutions based solely on the expertise of planners, managers, architects and others. There are, however, other problems and challenges that require adaptive work, primarily because technical expertise alone is insufficient to address the problems or challenges being faced. In this course, we'll focus on perspectives and methods for working through those later sorts of problems and challenges.