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 1: The City - Heaven and Hell

This short documentary film is the first part of a larger series hosted by Lewis Mumford, an American historian, sociologist, philosopher, and literary critic, who wrote the book The City in History on which this film is based. The film originally aired in 1963. This first film in the series uses historic footage from all over the world for a kind of meditative effect, punctuated with Mumford's philosophical observations on the past, present, and future of cities.

Warning: Some graphic images appear in the last third of this film.

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.

City Dreamers

The film "City Dreamers," directed by Joseph Hillel and released in 2018, tells the story of four women designers who worked to shape North American cities throughout the 20th century and into the 21st 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.

Urbanized

The documentary film "Urbanized" debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2011 and succeeds in popularizing a conversation about urbanism, urban planning, and cities in a way that few cultural artifacts have managed before or since.

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.

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.

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.

Introduction to Planning: Zoning as an Implementation Tool

This course discusses the Zoning Ordinance - its structure, its relationship to the plan and the sometimes confusing procedures through which it is modified and varied.

Introduction to Planning: Implementation of the Plan

This course provides an overview of implementation strategies for a Comprehensive Plan and examines how those strategies fit together.

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.

Introduction to Healthy Communities

This course provides an overview of the healthy community movement and the relationship between health and planning.

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.

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.

Healthy Urban Food Systems: Planning Production Facilities

This course examines the role for planning in addressing various forms of urban agriculture as well as many examples from around the country of the statutes, policy, and practices implementing interventions in food production at urban scales.

Healthy Urban Food Systems: Planning Retail Facilities

This course introduces information from legal and public health perspectives on the retail side of food systems entities, such as farmers markets, grocery stores, and mobile vending.