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Featured Courses
Jeff Speck outlines five principal reasons to build walkable communities, which include:
Understanding the basics of AI provides urban planners with ideas for integrating improved methods into their work and enhancing their analytical outputs. AI can offer data-driven insights for informed decision-making, predict future urban growth patterns, and optimize resource allocation.
Suburbs are taking center stage in America’s struggle to achieve equity and inclusivity. Urban cores are increasingly white and affluent, while poverty—with all its related dimensions of race, education, and class—is moving to suburbs.
Universal Design stresses the development of a built environment that is inclusive and welcoming for all, including those with physical disabilities.
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Introduction to GIS, Part 2
Take the next step into the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and ArcGIS Pro with an overview of navigation, map projections, and essential map design principles.
Design for Peace and Democracy
Explore how our designed environments can promote and support peace and democracy using historic examples of how the built environment – including parks, squares and streets – can be an instrument of oppression and serve as forums for both tyranny and uprising. We’ll return to the U.S. for stories closer to home, and frame the future in hope and optimism.
Placemaking for Innovation: Creating Innovation Ecosystems
The knowledge economy will dominate job growth by 2040, making local innovation a must. To attract the educated workforce needed to keep up, regions must focus on placemaking to create innovation ecosystems — vibrant, mixed-use areas where people can live, work, and interact.
U.S. Housing Policy: What Every Planner Needs to Know
Planners play an essential role in understanding and addressing the regulatory, social, and economic barriers to affordable housing. This course offers an overview of U.S. housing policy from its historical roots to modern challenges and solutions.
Taking Meaningful Action Towards Fair Housing
This course dives deep into fair housing, exploring everything from the importance of equitable housing laws to practical strategies for planners to promote fairness in zoning and development.
Introduction to Transit Service Policy
Gain the tools you need to understand how public transit networks are designed and how this informs public policy.
Introduction to GIS, Part 1
Learn how to navigate the ArcGIS Pro interface, understand the basics of map projections, and grasp essential map design principles. By the end of this session, you will have a solid foundation for further GIS exploration.
Green Infrastructure
This course defines green infrastructure, highlights its types and benefits, discusses monetary valuation and financing, and explores its role in addressing climate change, equity, and technological change.
Plain Language 102: Integrating Words and Images for Effective Communication
Build on your foundational knowledge from Plain Language 101 by exploring the power of visual presentation and layout.
How to Scope for Plan Implementation
Learn hands-on steps and procedures for creating a well-scoped and funding-ready planning study.
Navigating the Ethical Landscape for AI in Urban Planning
Uncover some of the largest ethical issues related to using AI in urban planning and the steps cities around the world are taking to ensure fairness, honesty, and accountability as this revolutionary technology becomes more embedded in the modern world.
Plain Language 101: Techniques to Write Clear, Readable, Inclusive Planning Materials
This course covers the basics of writing in plain language through a series of interactive chapters.
Planning the Plan: How to Develop the Scope for a Planning Study
Learn the basic steps involved in developing general planning processes, scope structure, and implementable outcomes.
Demystifying AI: Terminology, Tools, and Techniques for Urban Planners
Understanding the basics of artificial intelligence, or AI, is increasingly important for urban planners. Learn the capabilities, limitations, and language of emerging technologies that utilize AI methods.
Planning in an Era of Disruptive Change
The 21st century is a time of accelerating, disruptive change with profound implications for local communities. Unlock the planning foresight needed to navigate a rapidly changing social, economic, technological, and environmental world.
Roadways for People, Part 2
Home in on the Community Solutions Based Approach through the example of a recent project in Baltimore, Maryland to re-reroute and update an Amtrak tunnel that would affect the predominantly Black neighborhood of Reservoir Hill.
Roadways for People, Part 1
Using Portland's I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project as a central case study, Lynn Peterson and co-instructor Elizabeth Doerr explore why and how we need a more inclusive, people-centered transportation planning process.
The 21st Century Comprehensive Plan
Uncover the emerging and valuable qualities of the 21st century comprehensive plan that can be used to define visions for the future, including robust community engagement, crosscutting themes, and an accountable implementation program.
Making Room for Home-Based Businesses
In this crash course on home-based businesses, Nolan Gray explores how reducing zoning regulations could help revitalize communities and encourage entrepreneurship across the country.
Landscape Design for Social Sustainability, Part 2
Continue exploring how designers can create built environments that foster vibrant, engaged communities through contemporary theories and case study examples around social sustainability in landscape design.
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