All Housing Courses
Form-Based Codes 101: Preparing a Form-Based Code
This course explores basic questions and decisions to consider when preparing a form-based code. It also covers the different approaches to regulating urban form and provides guidance for selecting an organizing principle for your form-based code. Finally, the course explains the visioning and creating of a plan, followed by drafting, testing, and assembling your code.
Photoshop CC for Planners 4: Creating Visual Simulations
In this course, we'll use the skills and techniques covered in the previous three Photoshop CC courses to create an advanced visual simulation of a re-imagined public space.
Urban Design for Planners 8: Parking and Traffic
The final course in the Urban Design for Planners series addresses the automobile as part of the urban fabric. The storage of cars and high levels of congestion can be very detrimental to neighborhoods, but good design can mitigate those negative effects.
GeoDesign Using CommunityViz: Buildout and Visualization
This second course in the "GeoDesign with CommunityViz" series shows how the CommunityViz extension of ArcGIS can guide the design, and assess the impacts, of a project.
The DIY Form-Based Code: Testing and Refining
This third of four courses from the "DIY Form-Based Code" series shows how to use Excel and SketchUp to generate randomization tests, modeling, and refinements for a draft version of a form-based code.
GeoDesign with CommunityViz: Land Use Designer
Learn how the CommunityViz extension of ArcGIS can guide the design of a project and assess the project's impact. This course specifically focuses on a suitability analysis using essential functions and the Land Use Designer wizard.
Creating Interactive iPlans with iBooks Author
This course provides an introduction to the basic functions of Apple iBooks Author and demonstrates how the program can be used to develop interactive documents such as interactive iPlans.
AutoCAD for 3D Modeling
Most planners and designers don't use just one drawing or visualization program. In this course you'll learn how to create 3D drawings in AutoCAD and how to use AutoCAD in concert with other programs, such as Adobe Illustrator and Sketchup, to create illustrative plan, section, and perspective views.
AutoCAD for Site Planning
This course establishes a workflow for an illustrative site plan, including how to represent existing conditions and create detailed plans for specific areas within a larger project. Building on AutoCAD 101, learn to draw more complex plans using aerial imagery, photography, and hand-drawn sketches as the base layer.
AutoCAD 101
This course provides an introduction to AutoCAD’s essential functions for first-time users and demonstrates how to create site plans, street sections, and other two-dimensional scaled diagrams.
Geoanalysis with ArcGIS and Google Earth
Combining ArcGIS and Google Earth allows for a convenient, powerful way to create and share professional, accurate spatial visualizations of geographical analysis to a wide audience. This course explores how to prep shape files for ingestion into Google Earth, share city data with the public, and aid in pre-visualizing via geo-referencing around potential development sites.
Visual Simulation: Rendering Styles and Presentation with SketchUp
Learn to create finalized drawings in SketchUp that look more hand drawn than photorealistic. Using SketchUp and Adobe Photoshop, this course will help you take more control over final images than possible when only exporting from SketchUp.
Visual Simulation: Advanced Rendering in SketchUp
In this course, you'll learn to create an advanced rendering of a SketchUp site model, using a free third-party renderer called Kerkythea to design realistic lighting and shading. Then add components to your rendering in Adobe Photoshop.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 1
Building on Introductory SketchUp for Planners, this course introduces intermediate SketchUp users to the program’s geolocation functions and demonstrates how to create more complex models of planned projects or developments. Additionally, this course illustrates how to create and export video walk-throughs of SketchUp models using the program’s animation features.
CommunityViz Introduction
In this course you will learn practical applications for CommunityViz, one of the world's premiere GeoDesign and planning scenario tools. Planners, resource managers, local and regional governments, and others use CommunityViz to help them make decisions about development, land use, transportation, conservation and more.
Design in Planning: An Overview
In this course, Planetizen brings you an overview of design in planning. Using real world examples from design guidelines, plans, and manuals, city planner Jason Kambitsis looks at how code, practice and guidelines precipitate design and the form of our cities.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 2
In addition to accurately modeling projects, as demonstrated in the introductory courses, SketchUp is also useful for illustrating more abstract concepts, such as FAR, dimensional requirements and design guidelines. This course demonstrates how planners use SketchUp to illustrate requirements in zoning codes, design guidelines and form based codes.
InDesign for Planners - Intermediate
Adobe InDesign is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier document layout software, with a number of valuable applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction to InDesign course, giving you step-by-step instructions on some of the more complex tools that come with InDesign CS6.
InDesign for Planners - An Introduction
Adobe InDesign is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier document layout software, with a number of valuable applications for urban planning. This course gives you a step-by-step introduction to the basic tools of InDesign CS6.
SketchUp for Planners - Intermediate Part 3
Combining SketchUp and Adobe Creative Suite, this course demonstrates how to use SketchUp together with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to create illustrative and informative photo simulations, perspective views, sections and site plans.