Course Library
Discover hundreds of high-quality urban planning video courses.
Working From Home for Planners
The future of work and the future of education are location independent, and we’re all better off because of it. This course focuses on general remote work tips and three remote work topics at the forefront of urban planners' minds as working from home becomes a new normal in the field of urban planning: productivity, teamwork, and public meetings.
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.
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 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 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.
United States Census 2020: All About Census 2020
Learn all about the upcoming Census. This course provides an overview of planned operations and discusses the Census schedule, process, products, accuracy, publicity, and jobs.
Crowdsourcing and Urban Planning
Crowdsourcing is the gathering of ideas, content, voices, and services by leveraging the collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds.
Citizen Science in Urban Planning
This course introduces planners to citizen science and how citizen science can play a meaningful role in urban planning.
Leadership in Planning: Strategic Decision-Making in the Public Interest
At the end of this course, you will understand how to turn planning theory into practice in the real world.
Blogging About Planning
In this course we will review how blogs are used as planning tools to educate and engage participants in community decisions.
The Charrette Way: The Secrets to Collaborative Creativity
This course explores the transformative dynamics taking place in a multiple-day charrette.
Introduction to Charrettes
This course introduces the NCI System, a collaborative, design-based approach to public involvement.
MetroQuest Public Involvement Software: In Practice and In Action
This course provides an introduction to working with MetroQuest, what it helps planners achieve, and some of its most important features and capabilities. The course also presents a series of case studies to demonstrate the results MetroQuest has achieved for a wide range of planning projects.
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.
Build A WordPress Website
This ‘bootcamp’ course will help you develop a website layout using a self-hosted version of the popular content management system WordPress in under an hour. Learn to create and publish posts and pages, change the look of the site by using different themes, and manage the navigation, menus, and other content, such as as contributed modules and an image gallery.
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.
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.
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.