All Equity Courses
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.
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.
Resilience Planning for Coastal Hazards
Across the world, sea levels are rising and storm surge events are intensifying, while development is increasing in vulnerable coastal areas and groundwater depletion is causing land to sink. Urban planners are uniquely positioned to join the battle against rising seas.
Designing the Built Environment for People With Autism Spectrum Disorder
This course covers how autistic people experience urban and natural environments and the design techniques used to improve their experience.
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.
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.
Landscape Design for Social Sustainability, Part 2
Continue exploring how designers can create built environments that foster vibrant, engaged communities through contemporary theories and case study examples around social sustainability in landscape design.
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.
History of U.S. Landscape Architecture, Part 2
Picking up in 1970, this course explores how the role and uses of public parks changed and how the role of the landscape architect expanded to that of advocate, facilitator, and teacher in the late 20th century and the era of climate change.
History of U.S. Landscape Architecture, Part 1
Kristin Faurest explores the history of the profession of landscape architecture from its origins through the 1960s, providing a vibrant global context of how humankind has shaped its landscape over the ages.
E-Waste: A Growing Concern in Waste Management
Understand the alarming growth of electronic waste and its massive impact on the waste stream, explore innovative approaches used by communities to combat this crisis, and discover the far-reaching consequences of mishandling electronic waste.
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.
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
This course discusses crime as an environmental justice issue and reviews techniques that successfully reduce crime and make communities safer and healthier through Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) theory.
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.
Introduction to Lighting and Light Pollution
Discover the history and impact of light pollution on human health, the environment, wildlife, ecosystems, and the night sky.
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.
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.