I want to start off this blog post by expressing how truly happy I am that we had Professor Schmidt speak to us. I’ve been looking at Urban Planning in AAP ever since I got to Cornell and while I found the major incredibly interesting, I was despondent to discover that I may not have enough credits free to take a class in it for fun. But this talk with the Professor definitely opened up my eyes to how interesting and worth it the classes really are.

Start off, we talked about where each of the attendants was from and how we classified our hometowns. We had the majority of students labeled themselves as from a suburb, a few from urban areas (I’m from a city) and one participant saying she is from a small island in Hawai’i! We then talked a little bit about zoning and what makes each of us classify our homes this way.

It was so interesting to see the diversity of homes in the room. Only two participants were from the same place (Brooklyn) and the rest were very varied. I’m also very glad we had time to discuss income inequality and its palpability in cities. For example, we talked about how there are torn-down houses and a few blocks away there are huge mansions. Although being from a city most of this has been surrounding me my whole life and therefore I’ve been previously exposed to it to, I’m very happy to see others are recognizing it as a problem.