Arts & Culture
Design of the Build Environment
Economic Development
Planning for Climate Change & Sustainability
Housing & Real Estate Development
Mobility & Transportation Planning
Arts and culture play an increasingly important role in how our cities thrive – economically, socially, and environmentally. In Arts and Culture Planning students will prepare for positions in cultural affairs offices, nonprofit advocacy and program providers, economic development organizations, and political offices. Students will consider such concepts as cultural economy, creative placekeeping and placemaking, and cultural heritage as they learn to assess and spatially analyze community dynamics and work with disparate types of art interventions with those skills related to community engagement and improvement.
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Design of the Built Environment addresses the architecture of the city, viewed not as a series of individual buildings, but as a set of visual and functional connections between buildings on a street front or in a district. In contemporary settings, planning and construction do not begin with a blank slate. Rather, new structures are inserted into an existing built environment, which must be respected for its historical heritage and its contributions to the new. Students in this concentration are encouraged to draw from courses related to landscape architecture and historic preservation in the School of Architecture.
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Cities are the hubs of innovation for the global economy. Students in the Economic Development concentration will learn the fundamentals of urban economies, the causes and consequences of economic decline, and methods to lead vibrant and inclusive urban economies. This concentration will help students understand the role of creative and artistic sectors in urban economies, and will present strategies for planning for economic growth.
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Metropolitan areas are the source of most of our environmental quality problems, and most of the solutions to those problems. Planning and design of our cities and communities play a critical role in both pollution and exposure to its damages. The planners of the 21st Century must be skilled at analyzing environmental justice, sustainable urban design, public health, and climate change – all topics of focus within this concentration. Students will learn methods for analyzing environmental impacts, relationships between exposure and health, urban vulnerabilities to climate change effects, and the role of urban planning and public policies in achieving more sustainable and livable urban environments.
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Cities and towns worldwide are experiencing housing crises that range from severe affordability problems, insecure and informal land tenure, homelessness, social inequities, and low housing quality. Segregation and patterns of exclusion have consigned many persons to sub-standard or insecure housing. Students in this concentration will learn to analyze these problems through a lens of social justice while becoming skilled in market fundamentals. This concentration will train leaders who can span from the private to the public sector, and who will lead by using an understanding of the role of markets, market failures, and historic patterns of power and inequity to develop housing solutions. Students in this concentration will be trained to take positions with private developers, policy positions at all levels of government, and positions with affordable housing providers, and advocacy groups.
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Urban mobility is being disrupted by technology in ways that have not occurred in a century. New travel modes, and new transportation companies, are arising almost overnight. Transportation is essential to urban life. Against that backdrop, many of the fundamentals of urban mobility remain the same. Transportation shapes, and is shaped by, neighborhoods. Transportation occurs at the intersection of planning, Big Data, and politics, and the resulting policies affect patterns of equity and access throughout the city. Students in this concentration will learn skills in data analysis and technology, market structure, policy and public finance related to transportation. This concentration focuses on multi-modal transportation, including emerging topics such the role of alternatives to the car, trends in freight transportation, and best practices in public response to new technologies.
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