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.

Local Economic Development (LED) is centered on local resources, capacity and leadership to build sustainable communities, towns and cities. The course will introduce students to the principles, approaches and technical tools (such as location quotients, shift share analysis, etc.) of LED through lessons and case studies drawn from Canadian and international contexts.

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.

This course examines urban planning and policy in the Global South. We analyze the place of urbanization, and urban settlements more broadly, in the diverse and rapidly changing countries in the Global South. We address urbanization, relevant for students hoping to pursue professional planning work or engage in research on urbanization and development. We will examine urban policy decisions and draw on case studies and examples from around the world to examine how these policies play out. We introduce the historical context for urban growth in the Global South; examine colonial policies towards urban settlements and urbanization and the ways in which post-independence governments have built upon and departed from these approaches to planning; address policy and paradigms regarding the challenges facing contemporary urban settlements in the Global South; and examine overlaps between experiences in the Global South and North.

In the process of planning with change and planning for change, planners indelibly play an active role in shaping the future. It is this relationship to the future that makes planning fundamentally transformative—where plans and policies can wield long-term effects on people and places (for better or worse). Yet, the notion of “futures” as a crucial dimension of planning is often understudied. This course will engage with the imaginative and visionary potential of planning.

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.

Major drivers of change are influencing global cities including urbanization, climate change and disruptive technology such as AI. At the same time, large future investments in infrastructure and technology are required to meet the essential needs of citizens while improving the sustainability and livability of cities. However, there are many uncertainties over the potential unintended consequences from the exponential growth of data, and large-scale deployment of technology. Using global city case-studies this class will critically assess the ethical, societal and environmental risk and impacts of new urban data, technology, and infrastructure.

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.