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Video for Planners
Video can be a highly effective tool for communicating urban planning issues as well as increasing public knowledge and community engagement. This video course will walk you through the three steps of creating a video: capturing the footage, creating the video with editing software, and distributing video across the web. We’ll look at examples of urban planning departments that have used video well, and review different content types that you can use as a model.
Podcasting for Planners
Audio editing is a great way to tell a story, share information, create a digital record of events, or improve community outreach. In this course, learn the basics of podcasting and audio editing.
CartoDB for Planners
In this course, we'll cover the web interface of CartoDB, an innovative online mapping platform. Learn how to setup a basic map, add data from ArcGIS and other sources, and publish your map on the web.
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: Citywide and Countywide Code Updates
The final course in the "Form-Based Codes 101" series explores citywide form-based coding—the assessment of an entire city to determine where form-based code application should occur.
Writing for Planners: Documents that Work
This course reviews the different types of documents planners are called on to write—from one-page memos to complex master plans—and apply a simple writing approach that ensures the document's points are complete, compelling, and accurate.
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 3: Learning from the Grid
This course demonstrates the well-defined formal composition and spatial processes of how American cities evolve over time.
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.
Introduction to WebGIS
This course explains various Internet technologies commonly used to build web-based visualization applications with municipal data.
Building a Transit Map Web App
This course examines the entire process of building an interactive, web-based mapping application.
Writing Master Plans, From Start to Finish
In this course you’ll learn how to approach a master plan—starting with concept development and community voice, and finishing with the mechanics of organizing and expressing ideas.
Transit Service Design 101
In this course, we will review the principles of transit service design, how resources are allocated and accounted for, and using the Remix software platform, we will design and evaluate a new transit route.
Introduction to the UrbanSim Cloud Platform
At the end of this course, participants will be acquainted with the UrbanSim forecasting methodology, understanding the features available in the UrbanSim Cloud Platform and the basics of an UrbanSim model at the Census block level.
Conceptual Drawing for Planners
In this course, we will learn effective ways of drawing as a means to communicate design ideas and explore digital tools that support traditional drawing.
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.
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