PLAN 220 Introduction to the History and Theory of Urban Planning
This second-year lecture class introduces students to the history and theory of the profession of urban planning. The course builds planning skills, especially reading, research and writing through a semester-long research project, on a topic of students’ choosing. Through readings, lectures, podcasts and films this course acculturates students to the discipline and profession by exploring planning ideas and movements commonly understood to be the origins of the professional field, such as sanitary and moral reform movements predating the discipline, social surveying, settlement houses, city beautiful, garden cities, regional planning, suburbanization, rational planning, communicative action planning, equity planning and critical planning theory. The course grounds the origins of planning ideas and practice in contemporaneous events, including industrialization, population growth and decline, the concentration and dispersion of population in cities, urban technological development, and the growth and decline of national, regional and urban political, civic and economic regimes.