Urban Planning: Designing Cities

Look Closer, Then Reimagine: Why are some neighborhoods walkable and others built around cars? Who decides where housing, parks, and highways go, and whose voices get left out? In this course, you’ll learn to see the places you live through a planner’s eyes, while investigating land use, transportation, housing, public space, and the environment. Through fieldwork in your own community and case studies of cities around the world, you’ll explore how past planning decisions shaped today’s cities and how planners, residents, and policymakers work together (and sometimes clash) over what comes next. In a culminating project, you’ll choose an overlooked space in your community and design an intervention, from a bus stop or intersection to a park or a district, and present your proposal to a real audience.

Why Take This Course? Decisions that shape cities touch everything from climate to justice to daily happiness. This course helps you understand how cities work, gives you the tools to change one corner of your own, and lets you find out whether a career in planning, design, or public policy is for you.

Students in GOA courses will need reliable access to a computer with webcam/microphone connections, an email address (preferably school-based), a Web-conferencing app (GOA courses use Zoom), and a Word processing app (GOA courses use Google’s G Suite). When necessary, alternative arrangements may be made. Some courses require additional materials which can be found in the Course Outline. 

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