All Equity Courses
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.
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.
Resilience Planning for Heat and Drought Events
Learn how cities can prepare their infrastructure and social services for heat waves and droughts in a warming world.
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.
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.
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.
Landscape Design for Social Sustainability, Part 1
Discover how and why the built environment succeeds or fails at supporting thriving, diverse communities, and how designers can create mechanisms that allow communities to enjoy and improve their environments to suit their needs and desires.
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix it
Nolan Gray presents the complex history of zoning regulation, showing how major legislative decisions led to the country's current state of car reliance, sprawl, and inequity. Now, zoning reform is in the air. But why stop at mere reform?
Crime and Urban Planning in the United States
The spatial patterns and environmental characteristics of urban crime offer planners an opportunity to contribute to building crime-resilient communities.
Just Suburbs: The New Frontier for Equity and Inclusion
Poverty is being displaced from central cities to suburbs. As a response, planners should look to strategies that create mixed-income neighborhoods—a place that everyone can call home.
Suburban Remix: Creating the Next Generation of Urban Places
The economic, demographic, and technological forces reshaping suburbs are under-reported and misunderstood. Learn how suburbs can manage change while enhancing livability, economic opportunity, and fiscal responsibility.
A New Era of Downtown Opportunity: The Intersection of Housing and Innovation
Learn specific policy and urban design strategies for adapting downtowns to a new role: innovation communities.
Prospects for Zoning Reform
Catch up on the contemporary policy debates about zoning reform in the United States by learning from one of the nation’s leading voices on the subject, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Jenny Schuetz.
How Zoning Shapes Cities, Communities, and Regions
A better understanding of the basic components of zoning, history and evolution of zoning codes, economic and political goals of plan implementation, and impacts on housing prices and production can inform improved planning outcomes.
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.
Zoning for Incremental Development
Zoning codes can be crafted to lower the barriers to neighborhood-scale development and infill housing by providing specific tools for more equitable and affordable development.
Right-Sizing Zoning for Better Outcomes
Using elements of the built environment that contribute to a community’s unique sense of place and examples from across the United States, this course explores how to realign zoning with the goals and policies adopted in community plans.
Controlling Rents
This course introduces planners to the debate surrounding rent control, discussing both what rent control is able to accomplish, and where it often has unintended consequences.
Women and Cities 5: The Feminist Future City
This final chapter speculates on what a feminist city could look like, recalling case studies and ancient examples that include contemporary contexts but also consider future needs for a more heart-centered city designed for everyone.