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Greening the Neighborhood: Accelerating Sustainability with LEED-ND
This course reviews options and resources for local governments to leverage LEED-ND by examining case studies of local experiences and results.
Greening the Neighborhood: LEED-ND Core Concepts
Learn about the six key elements used throughout the submission preparation process: site type, boundary, buildable land, development program, terminology, and mapping.
Greening the Neighborhood: LEED-ND Metrics
This course describes approaches for making the LEED-ND calculations that will influence the work of the project team throughout the process.
Greening the Neighborhood: LEED-ND Globally and v.4 Update
The final course in the "Greening the Neighborhood" series discusses international considerations for LEED-ND and reviews LEED v.4, the first major update to the LEED-ND system since 2009.
Ethics: Balancing a Business Friendly Planning Environment
Over the past few decades and increasingly over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, has increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning departments amid shrinking budgets. As business interests engage and influence public agencies and planning strategy, the role of ethics is of increasing importance for the practicing planner. This is the first of a two-part series that evaluates and analyses the role of planners, from public window staff to department heads, in an increasingly business-friendly environment.
Code Drafting and the Law
In our complex legal society, understanding the basis of planning law and governing legislation is a must. The course begins with the building blocks of understanding codes, and goes on to explore how statutory authority and constitutional issues impact your everyday decisions. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary legal, quasi-legal and administrative practices.
Ethics: Balancing a Business Friendly Planning Environment, Part 2
Over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, has increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning departments amid shrinking budgets. As business interests engage and influence public agencies and planning strategy, the role of ethics is of increasing importance for the practicing planner. This is the second of a two-part series that evaluates and analyses the role of planners, from public window staff to department heads, in an increasingly business-friendly environment.
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.
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.
Introductory Population Analysis with Excel
Whether you're new to population analysis or just need a refresher, this course offers a comprehensive overview of the steps necessary to conduct analysis and develop projections using publicly available data. The course reviews Census data and builds skills, such as population projection, cohort survival, and concentration calculations that are essential for every professional in the planning and design community.
Illustrator for Planners - Introduction
Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with many valuable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course gives you a step-by-step introduction to the basic tools of Illustrator CS5.
Illustrator for Planners - Intermediate
Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with many valuable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction to Illustrator course, giving you step-by-step instructions on some of the more complex tools that come with Illustrator CS5.
Illustrator for Planners - Advanced
Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with many valuable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Intermediate Illustrator for Planners course, going into more detail on how the program can be used for logo design, map making and other uses.
SketchUp for Planners - An Introduction
Get started using SketchUp, the popular, easy-to-learn 3D digital modeling program. This course provides an introduction to how planners and architects represent three-dimensional objects in two-dimensions, with step-by-step instructions for creating and using simple 3D models.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 1
Building on Introductory SketchUp for Planners, this course introduces intermediate SketchUp users to the program’s geolocation functions and demonstrates how to create more complex models of planned projects or developments. Additionally, this course illustrates how to create and export video walk-throughs of SketchUp models using the program’s animation features.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 3
Combining SketchUp and Adobe Creative Suite, this course demonstrates how to use SketchUp together with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to create illustrative and informative photo simulations, perspective views, sections and site plans.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 2
In addition to accurately modeling projects, as demonstrated in the introductory courses, SketchUp is also useful for illustrating more abstract concepts, such as FAR, dimensional requirements and design guidelines. This course demonstrates how planners use SketchUp to illustrate requirements in zoning codes, design guidelines and form based codes.
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