Environmental Planning Issues

The class is divided into three, unequal parts. The first part reviews current American land use patterns, summarizes how local land-use and environmental planning works, and identifies key global environmental issues. Planners and those hoping to make positive changes must be aware of our greatest environmental problems so that we can recognize the importance of addressing incremental contributions at the local level. The second and largest part of this class will focus on understanding how our environmental problems evolved and what some real communities are doing to address these problems. Each week, we will read a detailed community case study that presents a set of regional efforts and recounts successes and failures. The final third of this class (three classes) will focus on sustainable design at the site level. We will review site planning and design approaches with an emphasis on "greener" best management practices.