The R. Wayne Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning supports a multidisciplinary creative culture where diverse values, experiences, and opinions are valued. Our departments, faculty, and students play a vital role in ensuring a well-rounded and broad approach in all aspects of teaching, learning, research, service, and outreach.
Urban Planning
The Department of Urban Planning recognizes that planners have a role in creating or allowing systemic racism, violence, injustice, and inequity. It is manifest in designs for the built environment, in development practice, in transportation access, in infrastructure siting, in housing policy, in finance, and in the location of polluting industries. We recognize our duty and responsibility to do better by revealing and challenging the inequities and injustices that exist and by using our agency to support historically marginalized groups. And we strive to incorporate these values into our teaching.
Engaging Communities of Color
The department is excited to offer a timely new elective in Fall 2020, Engaging Communities of Color, taught by Dr. Teresa Jeter. This course examines the impact of urban planning in communities of color as a matter of individual concern and as an object of policy and planning. We will study the effects of planning practices and social, economic, and political processes that create inequities in these communities.
Students in this course will:
- complete readings related to inequities in communities of color
- enter into discussions and thought-experiments with each other in regards to the assigned readings
- examine case studies about planning practices in communities of color and discuss alternative planning methods to address inequities
- complete a critical review of planning practice, of their choice, that seeks to address inequities in communities of color