Course Library
Browse our library of planning courses
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.
Lewis Mumford on the City 2: The City - Cars or People?
This short documentary film is the second part of a larger series hosted by Lewis Mumford, an American historian, sociologist, philosopher, and literary critic whose studies in the 20th century included attention to cities and architecture that persists in influence into the present day.
Classical Location Theory
This course traces the key theories and conceptual models that have been developed to explain why economic activities tend to locate where they do.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
The 2011 documentary film “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” documents the rapid rise and fall of a housing complex in St. Louis. Pruitt-Igoe became a symbol for the failure of public housing policy in the late 20th century.
Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City
The life and achievements of architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham offer a chance to witness the application of the social agenda of the City Beautiful movement, of which Burnham was one of the most famous practitioners.
The Future of Cities After COVID-19
This virtual panel discussion focuses on the potential for the COVID-19 pandemic to influence the development, demographic, and environmental trends of the future. Speakers: Allison Arieff, William Fulton, Scott Frazier, and Mariela Alfonzo. Moderator: James Brasuell.
The Human Scale
The Human Scale juxtaposes the urban experiences of cities across the World to raise questions about the costs of modernity and to argue in favor of city planning that reclaims the public realm for social life. This new approach to planning is measured by walking distances, social interactions, and social inclusion, rather than vehicle speeds and parking spaces.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
What makes good public spaces work, and why are some public spaces underused? Over the course of this film, William Whyte details insights into seven basic factors of successful public spaces: suitable space, interaction with the street, the sun, food, water, trees, and, finally, a term Whyte calls triangulation, or the ability of a public space to bring people together.
Introduction to City Planning 5: The City of Tomorrow
Learn why city planning is crucial to the urban future and why the success of future cities will depend on the extent to which they are sustainable, equitable, and how they use technology to serve citizens. Evaluate the key challenges facing cities in the future and, importantly, potential solutions for those challenges.
Incremental Code Reform: Enabling Better Places
The Congress for the New Urbanism’s Project for Code Reform streamlines the zoning code reform process by providing local governments with place-specific incremental zoning code changes that address the most problematic barriers first, build political will, and ultimately create more walkable, prosperous, and equitable places.
Introduction to Smart Cities
This course explores the characteristics and the challenges of smart cities, as well as the potential opportunities for smart cities within the design and planning fields. This course also discusses the drivers and the essential technologies in a smart city.
Transportation Planning: Principles and Practices of Transportation Finance
This course explains principles of transportation finance and reviews the general structure for funding transportation projects. Learn about the history of U.S. funding, from strong local funding to state and federal involvement to regional funding sources.
Transportation Planning: Making Transportation Plans—Rationality and Politics
This course explains the major forms of planning applicable to transportation, including rational comprehensive planning, strategic planning, policy analysis, incremental planning, advocacy planning, and communicative planning.
Defining Neighborhoods
This course reviews the varying definitions of neighborhoods and examines methods for defining a physical basis and tangible meaning to neighborhoods based on the location of neighborhood centers, boundaries, and spatial extents.
Transportation Planning: Strategies for Working with Roadway Capacity
This course explains the menu of contemporary approaches to modifying or adding to transportation capacity. It provides examples of capacity responses to regional mobility for commuters and local accessibility for communities.
Transportation Planning: Travel Behavior Regulations, Pricing, and Programs
This course reviews the efficacy of regulatory strategies (such as prohibitions and mandates), pricing strategies (such as peak period pricing), and education and information strategies (such as real-time ride-hailing apps).
Transportation Planning: Travel Behavior Principles and Modelling Approaches
This course provides an overview and critique of the four-step model used in transportation planning. By the end of this course, viewers will be able to conceptualize how transportation models can address contemporary problems in transportation planning, such as transit-oriented development.
Transportation Planning: Land Use and Transportation Systems
This course includes a brief history of how land use and transportation have co-evolved over the last 150 years and reviews the roles of transportation systems and technology in influencing land value and locational decision.
Transportation Planning: Effects on the Environment, Health, and Social Justice
This course discusses the local and global impacts of transportation systems and the mitigation of those impacts. The course also identifies prospects for change, as achieved by technology, transportation management, and pricing.