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Graduate / Concentrations

Land Use and Environmental Planning

This concentration prepares planners to work toward the long-term environmental and social sustainability of land use. The concentration focuses on training students to better inform private and public decision making processes related to land development, especially within the context of these ongoing issues of urban decline and suburban sprawl.

Students are taught to recognize the value-based and analytical conflicts that are common to land development and environmental planning debates and to creatively employ planning and policy making approaches designed to resolve those disputes. The challenge is to guide land development in ways that preserve and restore the ecological integrity of urban and rural systems while improving the quality of life for residents, facilitating a vital economy, promoting the efficient use of land and community facilities, and respecting fiscal and legal requirements.

Land use and environmental planners address a wide array of overlapping issues such as sprawl and intergovernmental growth management; the relationships between land use and transportation systems; the relationships between economic development and environmental protection; open space and farmland preservation; brownfield redevelopment; transboundary environmental issues; and environmental justice. Land use and environmental planners find employment in local, regional, state, and federal government agencies, as private sector planning consultants, and in environmental nonprofit organizations.

A student in this concentration should take two of the four foundational courses and the two techniques/methods courses noted below. The student should then select from other courses (especially those recommended below) to complete a program of study that best fits his or her interests.

* Indicates course is a cognate.

Faculty associated with the concentration:

• Richard Norton (Concentration Coordinator)
• Scott Campbell
• Larissa Larsen
• Jonathan Levine
• June Thomas
• Margaret Dewar
• Bunyan Bryant (School of Natural Resources and Environment)
• Matthew Lassiter (College of Literature, Science, and the Arts)