All Ethics Courses
US Disability Access Laws for Planners
Explore the key disability rights laws that shape planners' work — including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Architectural Barriers Act, the Fair Housing Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — to understand their core provisions.
Walkable City 4: The Safe Walk (B)
Explore how Vision Zero street design reduces speeding by addressing lane width, parking, street trees, intersections, signals, cycling, and pedestrian zones, with case studies from Lancaster, California, and Queens, New York.
Walkable City 3: The Safe Walk (A)
Pedestrian deaths are up 78% since 2009. While car use and size are long-term issues, safer street design — like narrower lanes and two-way roads — can reduce speeding now.
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.
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.
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.
Walking Towards Inclusion
Walkability's many benefits can lead to an increase in the value of housing. For low-income renters, this can mean displacement. David Dixon explains the main challenges to building equitable walkability and how planners can act to allow everyone to enjoy increased walkability in existing urban neighborhoods.
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.
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.
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.
Placemaking for Innovation: Creating Innovation Ecosystems
The knowledge economy will dominate job growth by 2040, making local innovation a must. To attract the educated workforce needed to keep up, regions must focus on placemaking to create innovation ecosystems — vibrant, mixed-use areas where people can live, work, and interact.
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.
Introduction to Transit Service Policy
Gain the tools you need to understand how public transit networks are designed and how this informs public policy.
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.
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.
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.
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?