Course Library
Browse our library of planning courses
Urban Design for Planners 3: Neighborhoods and Centers
This course demonstrates how to delineate a set of neighborhoods and neighborhood centers for a given area and suggests design improvements that enhance neighborhood centers.
Urban Design for Planners 2: Getting Started with QGIS and SketchUp
Course instructor Emily Talen guides viewers through the process of transferring a shapefile of building outlines into SketchUp and processes of basic manipulation necessary to create a 3D model. Learn how to load data into QGIS, set the coordinate reference system, and change the graphic display of data layers.
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
Urban planners and urban designers are interested in building places that embody beauty and hope. In this course, Emily Talen, PhD, FAICP, presents free urban design software tools that can help urban planners and urban designers visualize changes in the built environment to support the overarching goal of creating better places.
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.