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 prepares urban planning students to be critical spatial thinkers. Students develop skills in geographic information systems as a tool for solving planning problems while critically engaging with the contextual dynamics that impact spatial data and analysis.  

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.

This course looks at the actual, day-to-day practice of planning, including in connection with overall City Hall operations. Whether a planner is employed at City Hall or for a for-profit developer or a not-for-profit organization, the planner needs to understand not only how planning works within the planning department, but also how planning relates to other municipal departments - in other words, how City Hall functions as teams working together.

This is a practical “how to” course - it does not address the substance of policies or decisions, but it does teach you how to implement and execute those policies and decisions. We will review actual survey plans, legal agreements and other documents used daily by planners.

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.

This course explains the latest advancements and the broader ethical and societal implications of new data and technology for urban planning; reviews macro level drivers of urban change; critically analyzes metrics and indicators for measuring the performance of cities in the context of technology efficiency, economic growth, social equity and quality of life; and introduces concepts from AI and data science for planning and policy, as well as citizen engagement and ethical risk assessment.

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.