[not offered in 2025/2026 academic year] This course introduces students to the study of disasters, disaster risk reduction, and planning for disaster-resilient communities. It addresses such questions as What causes catastrophes?, Why are disaster losses increasing?, and How can communities become more disaster-resilient? The course focuses primarily on sustainable risk reduction for natural hazards and climate change adaptation. It will also consider technological hazards, human-induced disasters, direct impacts of climate change, and disasters in developing countries. 

This course introduces developing and implementing strategic/policy plans, using examples from metropolitan, city, and neighbourhood plans. Topics including land use, transportation, environment, and economic social and financial directions are combined into integrated plans for sustainable futures. We consider challenges with and opportunities of engaging public participation in plan preparation and implementation. We explore techniques for writing and managing plans at the city and regional-metropolitan levels. We introduce example plan-making under governance systems, including integrating new issues such as resilience into established plans.

How planning theory and practice relate to and inform each other. The role of reflection in planning practice, and how planners can improve their practice through reflecting on experience. Reflecting on the Planning Studio, and on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes learned in the MCRP program.

Collaborate with classmates and community, municipal, and private sector organizations in a mini-consultancy capacity to complete a real-world planning project for a real-world clients or project partners.

This course will explore the approach, roles, styles, and essential skills of planners in the normal situations of practical urban planning. Typical planning formats will be surveyed: area planning; policy planning; development management. Regulatory tools, development economics, practical urban design, and applied sustainability will be emphasized.

The ICP Practicum consists of (1) the Studio, which provides students an opportunity to experience service directly with an Indigenous community/agency, and (2) the Capstone, which allows students to articulate and demonstrate their competency developed in Indigenous community planning.

This course provides an overview of multi-modal urban transportation systems, including key characteristics, interactions, and analytical techniques. There are no prerequisites for the course, but some quantitative analysis is required and students should be comfortable working with spreadsheet software.

As more aspects of daily life become digitally mediated, planners can study urban processes in new ways. Urban analytics is an umbrella term for using new data forms in combination with computational approaches to better understand cities. While increasing data availability allows us to ask new questions –or shed new light on enduring ones– planners need to understand and weigh the risks and opportunities of this data revolution. This course teaches the fundamentals and application of python coding for urban data science. Students work on mini-research projects to apply their knowledge, and develop literacy in urban analytics publications and the field’s quickly evolving debates.

This course introduces types of transit planning, strategic to operational, across scales and times. Students will explore the technical tools and methods that support values-based planning as well as the range of community values which can be expressed by a community’s transit system. You'll learn from a range of practicing professionals and each other. You’ll develop plans and strategies within a context of opportunities and constraints, including geography, resource availability and operational considerations. Learning will be evaluated based on a combination of individual quizzes, group activities and a final project.

Research and preparation of a thesis on a topic in public policy or professional practice.

In special cases and with the approval of the MCRP Program Chair, a student may study an advanced topic under the direction of a faculty member.

The instructor will offer an overview of benchmarks in the evolution of planning theory, and its relationship with political movements and transitions in governance and policy values and models, as well as principal urban theory drawn from the fields of sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, and cultural studies.

The purposes of this course are to develop understanding and skill in the design of empirical research used in the analysis of policy and planning problems, as well as to develop the ability to critically evaluate policy-related research products.