Graduate Courses

This course focuses on the planning process, examining key issues such as how to get started, community engagement (stakeholders and public participation), situation assessments, visioning, issues identification, objective elicitation/structuring, option evaluation/prioritization, action planning, implementation and monitoring and evaluation.

This course explores the history of planning ideas and theories. What are the modern roots of (community and regional) planning, its colonial history, and how does this shape and perhaps limit contemporary practice? Why do we need planning? Why is it important to theorise about planning? This course covers the leading thinkers and schools of thought and is primarily focused on western ideas about planning.

This course is structured around the intersection of two essential themes that shape the theory and practice of planning in our world today: the shift to an increasingly urban world, and the expansion of interconnectivities between places, referred to as globalization, which has had such an important influence on the nature of urbanism around the world. 

The course enables students to develop basic capabilities in working with quantitative data for analysis in professional planning practice, including the appropriate use of statistical measures. This includes developing core vocabulary, conceptual understandings, critical awareness, analytical capabilities, and computer skills.

This two-credit course focuses on the what, why, who and how of qualitative mixed methods research design, data collection and analysis relevant to professional planning practice. This practice-based course provides beginning and more advanced students an opportunity to prepare for their professional careers. Students will learn about and apply each step of various methods and strategies in qualitative data collection and analysis useful for planning practice.

This course is designed to familiarize planning students with the legal principles that will apply to their work as policy advisors, decision-makers and advocates. Planning law can be, as one Supreme Court of Canada judge observed in a recent case, a “dry, forbidding and not very fashionable subject”. Yet on a daily basis, Canadian courts make decisions in cases involving collisions of sometimes epic proportions between community interests in sound management of land use and resources, and private property and business interests – cases at whose core can be found the work of a planner. Plans are implemented by means of regulatory systems whose operation is governed by certain legal principles, and it’s essential that those designing and operating such regulatory systems, and beneficial that those whose activities are subject to the regulations, know the relevant law.

This course examines/evaluates issues related to (1) community decision-making; (2) creating community plans; and (3) implementing community plans.

The planning studio is an intensive year-long professionally oriented course in which students partner with community, municipal and private sector organizations to identify problems and propose solutions.

The Internship Program that provides the mechanism for students to earn academic credit for relevant work experience outside the University. An Internship is essentially a three-way partnership among the student, the agency and the School. The primary goal of the Internship Program is to assist students to develop professional skills and capabilities through guided "hands on" experience in a workplace environment while gaining academic credit.

The major purpose of the Capstone is to provide students an opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of their planning education and to synthesize their knowledge of planning. The Capstone serves as a culmination of the MCRP degree program. It allows students to articulate and demonstrate the competency they have developed in their chosen focus area, through synthesis and/or application of the knowledge, skills, and capabilities they have gained in the program. It is expected that students will be able to use the Capstone output to demonstrate their professional competency to potential employers.

PLAN 530
Affordable Housing Policy and Planning
Instructor: Peer-Daniel Krause
Available during: Summer Session
Eligibility: UBC Graduate Student

Cities are not built by planners. Instead, urban space and the built environment are the product of negotiated interests. This course focuses on the real estate development perspective on the city. Students will develop a rich understanding of how urban land markets operate and how developers and investors assess and create value. The objective of this course is to equip students with the tools to navigate the planning-real estate developer relationship from a solid foundation of urban economics, urban political economy, and the basics of investment analysis and valuation.

This course examines/evaluates issues related to evaluating plans. This course builds upon material on plan creation and implementation by students are exposed to in the course, PLAN 525.

This course undertakes a detailed examination of urban planning and policy in the Global South. It adopts a seminar format, with most class sessions involving a discussion of readings and a group exercise, debate, role-playing scenario or guest speaker. The goal is to engage in a thoughtful analysis of the place of urbanization, and urban settlements more broadly, in the diverse and rapidly changing countries that constitute the Global South. We'll address both theoretical and applied aspects of urbanization and, as a result, is relevant for students hoping to pursue professional planning work as well as those intending to engage in research on urbanization and development topics. From a theoretical perspective, we will examine the debates that have framed the urban policy decisions taken by international organizations and national and local governments. At the same time, we will draw on case studies and examples from around the world to provide a grounded perspective on how these policies play out in real world contexts. The course ultimately seeks to provide students with a fluency surrounding the main issues and debates in urban planning and policy, and their relationship to development, and with the critical skills to approach related topics, whether in professional or academic contexts, in an informed and analytically rigorous manner. 

The course will begin with an introduction to the historical context for urban growth in the Global South. Early course sessions will examine, in particular, 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. The course will then address the key policy frameworks and theoretical paradigms through which the challenges facing contemporary urban settlements in the Global South are understood and addressed. Later sessions will focus on an in-depth analysis of the principal substantive challenges facing cities in the Global South, including rural-urban migration, service delivery, rapid growth of informal settlements, displacement and urban governance. The course makes a concerted point throughout of examining areas of overlap between experiences in the Global South and North, looking in particular at parallels between urban challenges in the South and issues facing communities in North America and Europe.

This course will introduce students to the laws within which Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, live, and which impact their communities and Nations. Students will gain an understanding of how law and governance inform planning with Indigenous communities.

This course provides an introduction to financial analysis and market analysis for urban development projects and applications in urban/regional planning, with an emphasis on quantitative analysis.

This is an experiential course, focused on building the practical skills of planners as facilitators and negotiators.