UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

As activity and professional practice, Urban Planning is commonly understood, as the deliberate set of actions taken by societies to organize the built environment to facilitate and enhance human activity. After a review of foundational readings, the course focuses on the way urban planning came about int he United States and the underlying forces shaping its discourse and logic, including the changing roles of public/private actors, and the planning mentality shaping the theory and practice of the profession. The course also de-couples urban planning theory from urban theory by examining three premises; (a) Urban Planning Theory's historical roots and justification are based on a vision of the city rather than arriving at prescriptions, (b) the dependence of effective planning on its context, who means that planning activity needs to be rooted in an understanding of the field in which it is operation, and (c) the objective of planning as conscious creation of the just city, which requires a substantive normative framework (Fainstein 2005:120)