All Bicycle Planning Courses
The First Five Years: A Practical Land Use Toolbox for New Planners
This practical course offers an essential "land use toolbox" for early-career planners working in both the public and private sectors that outlines how core planning processes, from permits and development reviews to public meetings and everyday counter interactions, actually work in practice.
Digital Accessibility for Planners: Documents - Part 1
By the end of this course, planners will be able to address common access barriers in documents they produce. The first course will provide an introduction to the topic and initial skills, while the second course will dive into more "advanced" skills.
Zoning Code Reform: Legal and Practical Considerations When Making “Quick Fixes” to Your Zoning Code
This course helps both public and private sector planners update and streamline their Zoning Code Standards of Review using legally sound best planning practices.
Federal Takings Law: Balancing Private Property Rights with the Public Interest
This course explores how the U.S. Constitution and federal takings law shape local planning, helping planners understand property rights, recognize legal risks, and advance the public interest within constitutional limits.
Generative AI Tools and Workflows for Urban Planning
This course introduces planners to the fundamentals of Generative AI (GenAI) and its practical uses in creating text, images, videos, and designs. It highlights how these tools can enhance and streamline urban planning practice.
Walkable City 6: The Interesting Walk
People are most interested in other people — so an appealing walk is one shaped by urban design that hides parking lots, avoids blank walls and monotony, shows signs of human habitation and craftsmanship, celebrates regional character, and offers a human scale.
Walkable City 5: The Comfortable Walk
To encourage walking, cities must create comfortable, well-designed pedestrian environments — like outdoor living rooms — with clear orientation, shade, tree cover, and cohesive design, achievable through tools like form-based codes, urban forestry plans, and strong urban design.
Walkable City 2: The Useful Walk
Learn the principal components of “the useful walk,” how zoning can create walkability and boost housing density, and why visual components are key to a walkable city.
Reinventing Malls: Planning Alchemy—Turning Gray Fields Into Gold
Explore the need and opportunity to reinvent aging mall sites into vibrant, inclusive, and economically valuable centers for 21st-century communities.
Walkable City 1: Why Walkability?
Jeff Speck explains his five principal reasons for building more walkable places — Economics, the Environment, Public Health, Equity, and Social Cohesiveness — arming practitioners with a full range of arguments in favor of pro-walkability planning.
The Good Street: A New Methodology for Balancing Place and Flow
International urban design consultant Lennart Nout explains the Dutch method for balancing conflicts between urban vibrancy and traffic flow and between different modes of transportation.
Planning Communities for Maximum Transit Access
World-renowned transit planner Jarrett Walker provides an overview of how land use and transportation planners can make their communities better for transit and the people who ride it.
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.
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.
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 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.