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Economic Thinking for Planners: Cities, Externalities, and Governance
Through history, people have become better off as they urbanized. This course investigates how and why the quality of life has improved in cities.
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.
Missing Middle Housing: Meeting the Growing Demand for Walkable Urbanism
Learn about Missing Middle Housing and how to integrate these types into existing neighborhoods.
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.
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.
Beyond Complete Streets for Walking and Biking
This course covers current practices in planning and implementation of infrastructure for biking and walking.
Introduction to Planning: The Comprehensive Plan
In this course we will discuss the comprehensive plan, sometimes called a “master plan” or a “general plan.”
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.
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.
The Ethics of Disruptive Transportation Technologies
This course discusses the process for making ethical decisions as part of planning for disruptive technologies.
History of City Planning 2: Modern Ideas of City Planning (1900-1939)
Explore the development of the city and city planning from 1900 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Learn how the birth of city planning as a formal practice shaped the cities that defined the century.
History of City Planning 3: Midcentury Modern (1940-1979)
Discover the impact of World War II and the Cold War in shaping city planning practices and how the tragic destruction and loss of life in World War II somehow created opportunities for planners to test new ideas.
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: 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.
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