City and Regional Planning

专业详情

The Master of City Planning degree requires completion of 18 course units, including course requirements from the core curriculum and one of six concentration areas.  Of those 18 credits, 15 credits must be from City Planning (CPLN) classes. In addition, all students must complete a non-credit planning internship between the first and second years of study.

The MCP core curriculum encompasses the basic skills and knowledge required of all planners regardless of their specialization, and is a hallmark of our cutting-edge and practical approach to educating city planners. Students who complete the core will understand the legal and historical basis of city planning; they will know how to use a wide variety of population and economic data to understand local communities; and they will understand the form and arrangement of cities and metropolitan areas around the world. Most important, they will understand which planning approaches work best in which contexts and circumstances.

The core includes two hands-on opportunities for students to engage real planning problems in real communities for real clients. The first of these, CPLN 6000 (600) Workshop (Spring), offered to first-year students and is organized around producing a community plan for a Philadelphia-area city, town, or neighborhood. CPLN 7000 (700) Planning Studio (Fall), offered to second-year students, centers on a more advanced and specific planning challenge. It gives students the opportunity to scope out a planning problem for themselves, design the appropriate planning process, and then, pursue that process to its conclusion. Studio topics vary year to year, but at least one studio usually has an international or comparative focus.