The professor is an engaging lecturer, and nice enough on a personal level. I've never loathed a class like this one, though. I've experienced my fair share of ideologues in the classroom, but her dogmatism was on another level.

If learning about social justice movements, the "global south", etc., is your thing, then this class is for you (I'm serious: you won't find someone better). Considering many of the students were borderline sycophantic, most people evidently got the memo before enrolling - unfortunately for my sanity, I wasn't one of them. If you have illusions about studying urban planning, as I did, best go elsewhere: other than a handful of swipes at Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, and Haussmann (which is standard practice at UCLA anyway) this class had nothing to do with planning.

Exams were straightforward, and the TA was great. Course reader was laughably expensive, especially for a class that often touched on the "neoliberalization of the university", but I digress.

Selling Course Reader for Urban Planning/Social Welfare M110
$50
If interested please contact me at jsifuentes.bruin@gmail.com

The class is super interesting (though many of the readings can be a slog). We covered topics ranging from Black Lives Matter to coffee farms in the global South to the plight of undocumented people in the United States. The class opens your eyes to a lot of global and local issues, and I really couldn't be more thankful that I took it; I feel like it's one of those courses which you see in movies or envision when you dreamed about college (or at least when I did).

Roy is the best and most engaging professor I've taken at UCLA. She is passionate and incredibly knowledgable about the material. Because of this class I'm pursuing working with her under the Institute of Inequality and Democracy.

You won't regret taking this course.

For Fall 2020, because of the COVID pandemic, Dr Roy utilized a "non-differentiated" grading format AKA all students received an A. I found this to be incredibly generous and flexible of her!

For the class itself, it's VERY heavy with readings. Be very mindful of that! Assignments were 3 short papers (500 words) and the final was essay-format of answering prompts.

Dr Roy is very knowledge, friendly, and personable. I would recommend this class if you're interested in planning history but to be very mindful of how heavy workload this course is. You've been warned!

AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING! If you have ever wanted to take a class that will give you an encompassing understanding of social movements and revolutions, TAKE THIS!

Professor Roy is an extremely passionate, intelligent, and most importantly compassionate individual. I took this class out of rec from the PUBAFF counselor, who I think was most concerned with filling the course of the new major so I was slightly caught off guard by how "radical" the course is (my TA started a section with playing a song called ANTIFA Dance). If learning about radical social movements is your interest, you'd enjoy it. However, I struggled to stay interested in heavy and wordy readings each week. I do appreciate the goal of the class but I cannot say the content was for me. There was an "A for all" policy due to the pandemic, so it helped eased the stress of everything else going on. I want to emphasize the part on the readings as I do not think I could've kept up with the class and gotten an A had it not been for the grading policy. They're not the type you can easily skim through as the exams required a deep understanding and engagement with each of them. When there's upwards of 4 academic journals at around 20 pages each per week, it will be hard if you're not interested in the radical content of the course.

Update: Book still available as of 03/16/17

Selling Course Reader for Urban Planning/Social Welfare M110
$60
If interested please contact me at jsifuentes.bruin@gmail.com

This class was interesting but felt very one-sided with regard to the texts we were reading. The majority of the texts assigned throughout the quarter were from militantly Marxist authors; which is fine, but I think it'd be more beneficial to the student to analyze thoughts from various schools of political thought.