Real-World Economics Meets Regional Planning

On the day of her final presentation, Intan Rafeena, a senior economics major, glanced down at her fitness tracker mid-sentence. Her heart rate had climbed to 140. She wasn't nervous about a grade. Two senior planners from the Metropolitan Council were in the room, and the analysis she was about to walk them through wasn't a case study. It was work that could help a real community make real decisions down the road.

Intan was one of 50 students in Lecturer Adway De's Environmental Economics course, this past spring. Where 14 groups built cost-benefit analyses on real climate strategies for the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities' regional planning agency. Topics ranged from EV charging infrastructure and transit-oriented development to solar permitting reform, urban tree canopy expansion and a dozen others. The partnership, brokered through the University's Resilient Communities Project, gave undergraduates an actual client, real deadlines and hands-on experience, something rare in the classroom.

"We didn't have the capacity to do the work we wanted to do, so the students helped fill that gap," said Abi Phillips, a senior climate and land use planner at the Met Council. "The broad goal [of this project] was for cities to be able to weigh what the cost and benefits would be of specific climate mitigation and adaption strategies before they invest in them."

Building the Partnership 

RCP, a program housed in the University's Center for Urban and Regional Affairs since 2012, exists to facilitate exactly this kind of partnership by matching local governments with faculty across the University's five campuses. 

"We're a front door for community partners who want to work with the university," said Stina Kielsmeier-Cook, RCP's program coordinator, who scouted the course catalog looking for a fit and landed on De's class. 

RCP typically pairs its partners with graduate students, but De's enthusiasm and an existing analytical framework he'd built won the Met Council over. "He was really excited about having an applied project," Kielsmeier-Cook said, "and he is really passionate about giving students an opportunity to work on real-world issues."

The nine-step economic framework De developed gave every team a common methodology, then left them to find data, identify costs and benefits, reach out to industry contacts and make the case for or against each climate strategy from a municipal government's perspective.

"This was a project where they were talking with real people who are planning and trying to do something locally," De said. "Some of them were really passionate about it."

What They Discovered 

The difference between a hypothetical assignment and a real one changes how students work.

Economics and math double-degree senior Seth Bose's team focused on transit-oriented development in Eden Prairie, a suburb set to gain a station on the Green Line Extension. His team found the economics unusually favorable: cities along the line stand to gain significant property tax revenue from denser development near stations, while the state and Met Council cover most infrastructure costs.

"It ended up being really beneficial in a cost-benefit analysis," Bose said. "The hope was that this could be used as evidence for cities that will receive the Blue Line extension too, to show the benefits are real even when the politics are messy."

Bose, planning to pursue a doctorate in urban economics, modeled 20-year uncertainty using Python to run a Monte Carlo simulation. The project didn’t change his trajectory so much as give it traction by using real application of concepts he’s studied, with real-world data problem to solve and real professionals to answer to. 

"If another city wanted to use the framework for a different transit project, they could," he said. "They'd just need to adjust the assumptions for their own starting point."

Intan's team studied public EV charging in St. Louis Park and ran into a central challenge of applied welfare economics: how do you quantify a benefit with no market price? Reduced emissions and better accessibility don't come with one. The team had to build proxies and document exactly how they arrived at each number.

"We had to make reasonable assumptions while remaining very transparent about our limitations," Intan said. "We didn't want to overclaim, but we also didn't want to undercount real benefits just because they were hard to measure."

The project reoriented her plans. She'd intended to pursue a CFA certification and a corporate finance career; now she's considering graduate school and wondering what applied EV research might look like in Malaysia, where the field is still new.

"I always felt the academic stuff bored me. I was just doing it for a grade," she said. "But through this project, I realized I can contribute to something much bigger. I could get into policy. I could do what Dr. De is doing. This class solidified that for me."

Looking Ahead 

For Phillips, the value was straightforward: capacity her team didn't have, delivered through Professor De’s established framework, which encouraged students to factor in variables such as tourism revenue and public health impacts into their cost-benefit analysis. 

Gillian Greenberg, a senior climate planner and 2024 University alumna, was once an RCP student herself and now sits on the partner side of the table. "I have seen the value of being able to work on a project where a local government partner is guiding the work," she said, "it pushes the project to be more practically minded than a lot of other academic projects are."

Both planners said they'd work with undergraduates again, with the right scope. "Students bring a creativity outside of the structure of a bureaucracy," Phillips said. "They can come up with ideas that are a little harder to pose within a big agency, and then we can use their work to advocate for those progressive ideas."

The Met Council now has 14 ROI frameworks to draw on as they encourage local government units to integrate climate strategies in their comprehensive plans. Staff are discussing a second phase, likely with a graduate or doctoral student, to build on and translate the findings for non-economists. De plans to teach the course again in spring 2027.

For Kielsmeier-Cook, the project is a case study in what the University is supposed to do. 

"When you think about the purpose of a university and who it's for," she said, "we're here to serve the state of Minnesota and its residents by combining the research and teaching mission of the university with that general service to the state. Projects and partnerships like this are really at the core of who we are as the University of Minnesota."