What it’s about:

The urban, community, and regional planning major focuses on creating livable, responsibly financed, and environmentally healthy communities. You learn about transportation, economic development, housing, land-use regulations, infrastructure management, and preservation of parks and other open spaces. Planners shape surroundings that are appropriate to the needs of urban, suburban, or rural residents.

What the study of this major is like:

To create a liveable community, planners must reduce conflicts between competing interest (real estate developers and residents, for example) and ensure that the development is fiscally, structurally, and environmentally sound. As an urban, community, and regional planning major, you explore such topics as physical and environmental geography, urban studies, transportation, land use and real estate law, community development and economic development, mapping, statistics, economics, history, political science, and human geography.

In this major courses are mostly in lecture format, although there are some design classes. Your course work will cover a range of tools and techniques [em dash] from computer modelling to group decision making; from statistical programming to brainstorming and values clarification. You will often work in groups addressing difficult questions as a team: Can a community learn to recycle, conserve resources, and protect wildlife? Are a community’s transportation systems appropriate for conditions anticipated in the next hundred years? How can a city upgrade the standard of living of its low-income residents? How can conflicts be resolved between developers and architectural preservation groups? How can volunteer groups, corporations, and governments work together to solve problems? Together with your team, you may visit project sites and tour development areas.

Generally, majors do internships with public planning agencies, non-profit groups, or private business. Independent projects (usually research papers) are also common. Students often have the most trouble with “spatial thinking” –understanding how the landscape is structured and how communities function. After a few required courses, thought, most students catch on. Group’s projects and small classes tend to create a friendly, supportive environment.

Planning programs may be housed in departments of geography, landscape architecture, or public administration, or in their own department. Planning programs tend to break down into three areas of concentration: urban, rural/regional, and environmental. Although all programs focus on land use regulations, the first two approaches emphasize distinct types of communities, and environmental planning deals with issues like pollution, environmental impact statements, clean-up of toxic waste sites, and natural hazards such as flooding and earthquakes. Because planning overlaps with many other fields, you may double-major in planning and another subject, or minor in a related field.

Planning is a hands-on major-you learn to analyze a situation, to imagine a better one, and to determine how to bridge the gap. Planning offers you a career in which you can conserve nature and help build a better world.

Career options and trends:

Land use planner: geographic information systems director: transportation planner; grant writer; housing coordinator; parks/open space planner; architect; cartographer.

Planners also find work in local government agencies dealing with zoning and community/economic development; fish and game agencies; and parks, transportation, and environment departments; in federal agencies such as the Forest Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Defence Mapping Agency, Housing and Urban Development, and Natural Resources Conservation Service; in environmental consulting companies, engineering firms, real estate companies, land development companies, and surveyors’ officers; and in non-profits groups such as the Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Lands, and American Farmland Trust.

With cities and rural areas growing in all regions of the country, there is a high demand for planners in the United States. Employment prospects will be best for those with a master’s degree as well as those with strong technical skills, and also for planners who can help communities prepare for both natural and man-made disasters.

Source: CollegeBoard 2012 Book of Majors