All Census Courses
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.
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 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.
Good Speed by Design: A Network Approach to Traffic Calming
Lennart Nout explains how to slow down car traffic with a comprehensive, network-level approach that goes far beyond just speed bumps.
Introduction to Dutch Network Planning
An overview of how the Netherlands became the safest country in the world for cycling, and how other countries can replicate their success by thinking about cycling infrastructure on a network level.
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.
Interpreting Places and Spaces
Interpretive media can dramatically enhance people's experience of place. Learn how to develop and execute a plan that brings the stories tied to places to life.
Designing a Wayfinding System
Learn how to create a comprehensive wayfinding signage system for your municipality from start to finish.
Planning a Municipal Wayfinding System
Often overlooked, wayfinding is important for urban design, accessibility, and economic development. Learn the elements of a successful wayfinding system in this course.
Introduction to Transit Oriented Development
Few terms are as common in the discussion of city and regional planning in the 21st century as transit oriented development (TOD)—the planning and designing of high-demand land uses at or near highly efficient modes of transportation.
Incorporating the Sustainable Development Goals into the Planning Process
This course focuses on the many ways planners can infuse sustainability into local planning activities and policies using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a guiding framework.
Solving Coverage and Location-Allocation Problems
Location-allocation problems involve locating supply sites and simultaneously allocating demand to those sites so the entire system is optimized. With this course, you will learn the basic principles of the coverage and location-allocation problems and be able to solve them using LINGO software and map the results in QGIS.
Location Optimization
This course introduces the basic principles of location optimization models and provides a hands-on tutorial on point-based location optimization using QGIS and LINGO.
Urban Design for Planners 5: Density
Emily Talen, PhD, FAICP teaches urban design strategies for increasing density in neighborhoods and locating infill development appropriate to the context of specific neighborhoods. Talen also introduces urban design interventions proven to increase density.
Urban Design for Planners 4: Mix and Proximity
Course instructor Emily Talen, PhD, FAICP provides step-by-step instruction on how to use data sets to visualize and map the configuration of mix and density along main commercial corridors and neighborhoods.
Urban Design for Planners 3: Neighborhoods and Centers
This course demonstrates how to delineate neighborhoods and neighborhood centers in a given area and also illustrates a sample of neighborhood enhancing design improvements.
Urban Design for Planners 2: Getting Started with QGIS and SketchUp
Course instructor Emily Talen guides viewers through the process of transferring a shapefile of building outlines into SketchUp and processes of basic manipulation necessary to create a 3D model. Learn how to load data into QGIS, set the coordinate reference system, and change the graphic display of data layers.
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
Urban planners and urban designers are interested in building places that embody beauty and hope. In this course, Emily Talen, PhD, FAICP, presents free urban design software tools that can help urban planners and urban designers visualize changes in the built environment to support the overarching goal of creating better places.
Introduction to New Mobility
The course on "New Mobility" covers the gamut of technological advancements where planning, transportation, and infrastructure design intersect.