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Just Suburbs: The New Frontier for Equity and Inclusion
Poverty is being displaced from central cities to suburbs. As a response, planners should look to strategies that create mixed-income neighborhoods—a place that everyone can call home.
Accessory Dwelling Units: Understanding America’s Newest Housing Typology
Explore the latest ADU policy developments from leading American cities, key challenges and opportunities for increasing or limiting ADU production, first-hand examples, and best practices in ADU affordability programs.
The Elements of Citymaking: Design, Policy, and Finance
Examine the theory of city-making at various scales, ranging from a development site at the smallest scale to the largest urban regions.
Women and Cities 4: Gender Equity in the Public Sphere
This course will outline the way in which women have occupied public spaces and the transition into a greater level of visibility for women in cities.
Women and Cities 5: The Feminist Future City
This final chapter speculates on what a feminist city could look like, recalling case studies and ancient examples that include contemporary contexts but also consider future needs for a more heart-centered city designed for everyone.
How Zoning Shapes Cities, Communities, and Regions
A better understanding of the basic components of zoning, history and evolution of zoning codes, economic and political goals of plan implementation, and impacts on housing prices and production can inform improved planning outcomes.
Suburban Remix: Creating the Next Generation of Urban Places
The economic, demographic, and technological forces reshaping suburbs are under-reported and misunderstood. Learn how suburbs can manage change while enhancing livability, economic opportunity, and fiscal responsibility.
Equitable Transit Oriented Development
Equitable transit oriented development (eTOD) prioritizes inclusive community development in multi-modal regional growth.
The YIMBY Movement: Opportunities and Challenges for Planners
Yes In My Back Yard, most commonly referred to as YIMBY, is a grassroots social movement advocating for an increase in housing development at the regional, city, and neighborhood levels. This course examines YIMBY organizational structures and the roots, goals, setbacks, successes, and tactics of the movement.
Designing the Megaregion
Current megaregion development is destabilizing the natural environment, causing gridlock on highways and congestion at airports, and making cities and suburbs separate and unequal. This course discusses how we can change these trends and invest in megaregions to improve planning and development outcomes developing and older areas.
Form-Based Codes: Using Building Types, Part 1
Learn about building types in the context of form-based coding and how building types can be a direct way to achieve compatible and more predictable built results.
Form-Based Codes: Using Building Types, Part 2
By the end of this course, you will have a high understanding of the range of building type choices, their importance, and where and how to apply them to achieve compatible and more predictable community character objectives.
Virtual Reality for Planners 1: Introduction
Virtual reality presents urban planners with a unique tool to create immersive virtual experiences that can inform visioning processes, design decision-making, and community engagement. Learn about the evolution of virtual reality technology, its key vocabulary and logistics, the benefits of virtual reality over traditional media, and what the future of public engagement may hold.
Virtual Reality for Planners 2: Modeling in SketchUp
This course provides a step-by-step SketchUp tutorial and teaches users how to create content appropriate for a virtual reality environment. Viewers will learn how to optimize the performance of their software and ensure success in the next steps of the process, including final model export to Unity.
Virtual Reality for Planners 3: Working with Unity
This course provides a high-level overview of the process involved in creating a virtual reality application and teaches viewers how to assemble a virtual reality application from scratch using Unity how to make the process as successful as possible.
Virtual Reality for Planners 4: Refining the End User Experience
Creating a VR experience is one thing, but managing its use at public events and integrating it into the urban design workflow is an extra, separate step. This course considers the bigger picture and covers a few ways to fine-tune the user’s experience for maximum success.
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.
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 3: Neighborhoods and Centers
This course demonstrates how to delineate neighborhoods and neighborhood centers in a given area and also illustrates a sample of neighborhood enhancing design improvements.
Urban Design for Planners 4: Mix and Proximity
Course instructor Emily Talen, PhD, FAICP provides step-by-step instruction on how to use data sets to visualize and map the configuration of mix and density along main commercial corridors and neighborhoods.
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