Walk through any city and you pick up on things that are hard to put a number on. The noise of a main road, the heat that sits between buildings in summer, the question of whether that little park around the corner is really enough green space for the whole neighborhood. These are exactly the kinds of questions Michael Wurm’s course in the EAGLE Master’s program digs into, and it does it in a way that changes how you see a city afterward.
At its core, the course is about environmental exposure in urban areas, basically how people in cities end up exposed to environmental burdens and how you actually measure that using earth observation data. Air pollution is just one piece of it. Noise exposure matters just as much, along with urban heat islands, access to green space, and traffic, which runs through all of it and shapes it at the same time. Wurm teaches students not to look at these things in isolation but as a web of factors that feed into each other and end up defining what it actually feels like to live in a given neighborhood.
In practice that means working with satellite data, sensor networks, modeling approaches, and always asking what it all means for real people on real streets. Anyone who’s ever laid a noise map or a surface temperature map over a city knows how fast abstract pixel values turn into social questions. Who lives next to the loud street. Who doesn’t have a park within walking distance. That’s exactly where the course picks up, and it’s exactly why it tends to stick with EAGLE students long after the semester ends.
