Environmental Planning - Minor

Environmental planning represents interdisciplinary practices that direct decision making for urban planning, urban design, land development and natural resource conservation challenges. Implicit in environmental planning concepts and techniques that professionals in these fields employ are considerations of environmental, social, political and economic factors. Hence, environmental planning applies natural and social sciences to promote environmentally sound growth, effective management of natural resources, and strategies of urban development to offer frameworks for achieving sustainability. To address these goals, environmental planning might enlist the traditional skills of landscape architects and urban planners, such as physical planning and site design, to inspire more creative and ecologically informed plans and help mitigate the detrimental effects of development. 

The Environmental Planning Minor provides non-ENVD students experiences with the process, technical skills and professional practice of planning. Students learn to use planning-based software applications, the theoretical and conceptual dimensions of planning and take a six-credit planning studio as a capstone of the experience. The minor is directed at students seeking to employ interdisciplinarity into their major using the tools of planning and landscape architecture. The program may also contribute to the education of students considering graduate study in planning, urban design, architecture and landscape architecture. The curriculum of the minor requires courses in history and theory, technology, a capstone studio and two electives that may include any ENVD course not otherwise applied to the program requirements.