Urban and Regional Planning

Chair: Thomas A. Clark, 303-566-3296
Associate Chair: Pamela Wridt, 303-556-3472
Office: UC Denver Building 330
Telephone: 303-556-3382
Fax: 303-556-3687

Faculty

Professors:

*Louise Chawla, PhD, City University of New York

*Thomas A. Clark, PhD, University of Iowa

*Yuk Lee, PhD, Ohio State University

*Fahriye Hazer Sancar, PhD, Pennsylvania State University

*Willem K.T. Van Vliet, PhD, University of Toronto

Associate Professors:

*Bruce Goldstein, PhD, University of California, Berkeley

*Kevin Krizek, PhD, University of Washington

Raymond McCall Jr., PhD, University of California, Berkeley

*Brian Muller, PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Assistant Professor:

*Jeremy Németh, PhD, Rutgers University

Senior Instructor:

*Pamela Wridt, PhD, City University of New York

Instructor:

John T. Barbour, MURP, University of Colorado

Additional information about faculty in this department is available online here.

*Also teach graduate courses.

Urban and regional planners in the United States and other countries seek to identify social needs and environmental capacities, anticipate change and its impact on communities and shape the pattern of human settlements. Studies in planning focus on making a positive and lasting impact on the lives of people, both in Colorado and around the globe. Every society throughout history has addressed the same fundamental questions, which urban and regional planners have the ability to help answer:

Where should settlements be located?
What economic, social and political activities fit what places and spaces?
By what measures should the performance of cities and regions be judged —equity? efficiency? sustainability? diversity? beauty? utility?
How do urban places and rural regions connect with the wider spaces and more expansive networks that compose the global space-economy?

The Department of Planning and Design, along with the college’s other departments —architecture and landscape architecture —offers a four-year bachelor of environmental design (BEnvd) degree on the CU-Boulder campus. The Department of Planning and Design offers the master of urban and regional planning (MURP) graduate degree on UC Denver’s Denver Campus. The MURP program is a fully accredited two-year graduate professional degree program that has maintained this standing over many periodic reviews conducted by the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB). It is a “national” program, drawing students from many states and abroad, and sending its graduates on to serve an equally vast geography.

Objectives

Planning’s mission is to identify the root causes of urban and regional problems; to fashion strategies that deploy policies, plans, resources and regulatory approaches to create urban and regional environments suited to human and ecological needs; and to develop methods for evaluating the human and environmental consequences of urban problems, programs, policies and plans.

Through research our faculty members have emerged as national, even global, leaders in addressing some of the most vexing problems of the field, regionally, nationally and internationally. Through study students will gain firsthand experience with real-world challenges while addressing essential theories and state-of-the-art methodologies of the field.

Graduates have the ability to advance to positions of great responsibility in Colorado, across the nation and abroad, in both the public and private sectors, in planning per se, and in related fields. University of Colorado Denver graduates continue to maintain a very high pass rate on the national examination administered for entry into the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP).

The essential tasks of planning require a high order of ability to:

Amass and manipulate information
Represent and model essential phenomena and processes
Stimulate alternative futures and judge outcomes having diverse dimensions
Portray and communicate key concepts
Harness knowledge about all the key actors on the scene in order to elicit their input and to understand their needs

Succinctly put, the education of planners can only begin in the university. It must be a life-long pursuit, and planning programs are becoming increasingly supportive of the continuing education needs of professionals. It is the intellectual excitement of this ongoing pursuit of knowledge that draws many to the field —this, and the opportunity to change the world.