Courses

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.

The format will be an interactive workshop. Course structure and content will include discussion on the scope of the master’s thesis in planning; the role of informing theory and relationship with the larger planning and urban studies discourses and debates; and a reading list drawn from planning, the humanities and social sciences, and urban/community policy studies. 

Public health, transportation, and the built environment introduces students to the impacts that the urban built environment has on public health, with an emphasis on how the built environment affects travel behaviour which, in turn, affects health. Students will gain both a framework for assessing the built environment of urban areas, as well as gain a perspective on the many pathways by which the built environment relates to multiple health outcomes, including both physical and mental health. Students will be exposed to a wide selection of research papers establishing the links between the built environment and public health outcomes and it is expected that students will be able to apply these findings to specific transportation planning processes and projects. This course will be of interest to graduate and upper-level students in planning, public health, geography and real estate development.

This course is about how decisions regarding the shape of our communities and its supporting transportation infrastructure, services, information, policies, and oversight can help enable the ‘good’ cities we strive for. This course will provide broad foundational knowledge of urban transportation infrastructure, service, and policy matters, through lenses of equity (affordability, access to opportunity, housing), reconciliation (access to opportunity, land rights, economic self-determination, among others), climate action, and resilience. The course will be delivered in the form of lectures, guest lectures, seminar-style dialogues and hands on tours and workshops.