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Planning and Promoting Your Community Engagement Process
This course provides you with a step-by-step process for designing an effective public engagement process.
Best Practices for Community Engagement
This course provides you with solid understanding of the benefits to community engagement, the psychology of public participants, an overview of the tools and tactics to choose from and advice on the creation of a public engagement plan to meet the needs of your projects.
Form-Based Codes 101: Legal Aspects
This course explores the legal issues of creating and using a form-based code.
Form-Based Codes 101: Preparing a Form-Based Code
This course explores basic questions and decisions to consider when preparing a form-based code. It also covers the different approaches to regulating urban form and provides guidance for selecting an organizing principle for your form-based code. Finally, the course explains the visioning and creating of a plan, followed by drafting, testing, and assembling your code.
Form-Based Codes 101: Downtowns
Downtowns are the historic center of most American cities. In this course, we will review their role in establishing the past and future character of the city, walking through a series of form-based code case studies across a range of scales and contexts.
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.
Form-Based Codes 101: Neighborhoods
This course introduces the essential elements of neighborhoods.
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: Introduction
This course defines form-based codes, explains why they were invented, and distinguishes form-based codes from conventional "use-based" zoning ordinances—all with an emphasis on placemaking and walkability. We will provide an overview of the development of form-based codes, their mandatory and optional component parts, and the importance of making form-based codes context or place-specific.
Defensible Sign Regulations
Communities regulate the characteristics of signs to achieve multiple goals, such as limiting driver distraction, maintaining the aesthetic character of the community, and implementing aspects of related plans. This course will show participants how to draft—and adopt—sign ordinances that accomplish those purposes while conforming with the First Amendment.
Regulating Sex Businesses, Part 2: Practical Tips
This course will provide practical tips for developing local zoning and licensing regulations for sexually oriented businesses. This course builds on material from Part 1 of this two-part series.
Regulating Sex Businesses, Part 1: Principles and Foundations
This course shows how to lay the foundation for ordinances that mitigate the negative effects of sex businesses while conforming with constitutional requirements under the First Amendment.
Planning and the Law: Procedural Due Process
The United States Constitution protects rights to "due process." In a land use law context, due process is why local governments must treat legislative and quasi-judicial decision making differently. At the end of this course, students will be able to differentiate between legislative and quasi-judicial decisions and to understand the due process implications of the distinction.
Planning and the Law: The Takings Clause
This course will help students understand and explore three legal concepts borne of the United States Constitution's Takings Clause: eminent domain, regulatory takings, and exactions. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify whether a particular government action is at risk of violating the Takings Clause.
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.
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.
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.
Planning Ethics
The work of planning for communities is rooted in values, often unexpressed, about the role of government in working for a better future. This course reviews the expectations expressed in the AICP Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct and then explores the application of the code in a number of planning ethics case studies. This conversation about building and sustaining an ethical planning organization sets out to define what makes an ethical planning organization and describes steps that planners can take to improve the ethical climate of their organizations.
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.
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