All Equity Courses
How to Survive Your First Planning Commission Meeting
New
This course prepares new planners to confidently navigate their first planning commission meeting and understand the role these meetings play in the broader planning and decision-making process.
Public Speaking, Communication, and Influence for Planners
New
Planners regularly present complex information to decision-makers, community members and project teams, yet many early-career planners receive little training in how to communicate ideas clearly, persuasively and confidently. This course helps planners strengthen their professional voice by developing skills in storytelling, public speaking and persuasive communication.
Own Your Worth: Salary Negotiation & Strategic Career Growth for Planners
New
This course equips new planners with practical strategies to navigate compensation conversations, build a professional portfolio, and plan their long-term career growth.
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.
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.
Decking Highways: Reconnecting Communities
This course guides communities through the highway decking process from initial visioning through planning and implementation by exploring key motivations such as community goals, equity considerations, and technical challenges.
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.
Taking Meaningful Action Towards Fair Housing
This course dives deep into fair housing, exploring everything from the importance of equitable housing laws to practical strategies for planners to promote fairness in zoning and development.
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.
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?
Building Bad, Part 1: How Architectural Utility is Constrained by Politics
Discover the theory of “Building Bad”: an examination of the costs and benefits that can limit the functionality of buildings in exchange for profits.
Lighting Regulations and Dark Sky Places
Learn best practices for crafting lighting regulations and dark sky designations that protect night skies and improve environmental and public health.
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.