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The Story of Sprawl - With Commentary Tracks
This series of historic films, ranging from 1939 until 1965, offers a unique look at the forces that created urban sprawl. Join expert commentators as we go back in time and uncover how America changed shape.
Planning and Promoting Your Community Engagement Process
This course provides you with a step-by-step process for designing an effective public engagement process.
Introduction to Healthy Communities
This course provides an overview of the healthy community movement and the relationship between health and planning.
Comprehensive Planning for Healthy Communities
This course covers the process of incorporating public health goals into a General Plan or Comprehensive Plan for a region, county, city, town, or neighborhood.
The American City, Part 1: A Brief History of the Regular Grid
Learn why the regular grid has been a standard part of the town planning vocabulary around the world for nearly five millennia.
The American City, Part 2: The Invention of a New Scale
Understand how the physical characteristics of block size and street length distinguish American cities from earlier models of urbanism, and the implications of these physical characteristics for sustainability in the 21st century.
The American City, Part 4: Complexity and Pattern in the City
Understand how sustainable urbanism can be a crucial component of the urban pattern, or otherwise subverted by government regulations and business models.
Parking Reform Made Easy
Reforming minimum parking requirements is one of the most effective ways to support Smart Growth. This course explains the many problems created by the parking regulation status quo before presenting a process for reform, providing examples of parking management tools, and discussing strategies for dealing with political and stakeholder issues.
Form-Based Codes 101: Learning How To Look
This course will teach you the skills to appreciate and analyze the measures and functions of good urbanism.
Form-Based Codes 101: Corridors
Corridors have historically been a key element of the urban fabric of every American town and city, yet they are also commonly problematic. This course looks at the roots of the problem for examples of how corridors can be designed and coded.
Tactical Urbanism: How It's Done
From unsanctioned crosswalks to city-led "Pavement-to-Plaza" programs, instructor Mike Lydon describes the success of short-term, temporary projects in influencing long-term physical and policy changes in cities across the United States and Canada.
Healthy Urban Food Systems: Planning Retail Facilities
This course introduces information from legal and public health perspectives on the retail side of food systems entities, such as farmers markets, grocery stores, and mobile vending.
Healthy Urban Food Systems: Planning Production Facilities
This course examines the role for planning in addressing various forms of urban agriculture as well as many examples from around the country of the statutes, policy, and practices implementing interventions in food production at urban scales.
Regional Scenario Planning: An Overview
This first of two courses offers a brief history of regional scenario planning in the late 20th century and beyond, with examples from Portland, Oregon's Vision 2040, Salt Lake City's Envision Utah, and the Chicago Metropolis Plan. Principles of regional planning relating to land use, urban design, and transportation are discussed. Finally, more advanced regional planning topics are touched on, including jobs/housing balance, and the relationship between demographics and regional housing market demand.
Gephi for Network Analysis and Visualization
Network Analysis helps urban planners, designers, and policy makers explore the dynamics and complexities of social networks and organizations. This course demonstrates the ways you can use the open-source Gephi software to visualize and analyze online social networks.
Developing a Fact Basis for Hazard Planning
As sea levels rise and the changing face of natural disasters display increasing intensity, hazard mitigation has become a hot button issue in cities across the globe. This course focuses on techniques for assessing hazard exposure and physical and social vulnerabilities.
Disaster Resilience and Recovery Through Land Use Planning
This course focuses on common planning tools and policies for hazard recovery and mitigation. Disaster Resilience is a product of Texas A&M's Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, focusing principly on storms, hurricanes, water damage, climatological concerns, and flooding in a new era of catastrophes. Topics include social mitigation for vulnerable communities, adoption and implementation of mitigation strategies, and real-world examples of recovery efforts in areas impacted by Hurricane Ike.
Tactical Urbanism: An Introduction
Developed in conjunction with other movements, the Tactical Urbanism approach allows a host of local actors to test new concepts before making substantial political and financial commitments. Sometimes sanctioned, sometimes not, Tactical Urbanism features the following five characteristics: phased instigation, meeting local planning challenges, realistic and short term, low risk-high gain, and stakeholder capacity building.
Bicycle-Friendly Streets: Design Standards
"Bike Friendly Streets: Design Standards" presents examples of cities across the United States and globally redesigning their streets to accommodate and encourage bicycling. From road diets that make room for bike lanes to complete redesigns of streets, cities are stepping up to the challenge of providing a variety of options for the bicyclists in their communities.
The Human Scale
The Human Scale juxtaposes the urban experiences of cities across the World to raise questions about the costs of modernity and to argue in favor of city planning that reclaims the public realm for social life. This new approach to planning is measured by walking distances, social interactions, and social inclusion, rather than vehicle speeds and parking spaces.
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