Course Summary:

The programme is designed to ensure that delegates have a good conceptual understanding of core areas, and to develop key competencies necessary to planning. The focus in the course is on physical planning, and on considering questions of environmental, social and economic sustainability in relation to physical planning at various scales. 
Planners with this orientation should thus have an understanding of planning and its history, and the current orientation towards planning for sustainable development, and its implications for practice.

The course's main focus areas are urban dynamics modelling and integrated planning, human settlement design, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing analysis and the design and development of decision-support systems

They should be able to develop contextually appropriate plans at various scales, to formulate planning policies and generate and manage planning projects, with a strong orientation towards questions of sustainability. The course also develops within delegates the capacity to think critically about planning and sustainability.

Course Objectives:

• Urban dynamics modelling and integrated planning
• Human settlement design, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing analysis
• Decision-support systems.

Course Outline

Human settlements design

• Monitoring and evaluation of settlement and infrastructure-related projects and programmes
• Primary and secondary research utilising a range of methodologies and techniques including participatory action research, household surveys, focus group workshops and spatial analysis
• Policy/strategy analysis and development
• Targeted training programmes, capacity building and technology transfer workshops
• Development of user-friendly manuals and guideline documents

Urban and regional planning

• Strategic and integrated development planning
• Urban and rural planning and urban growth management
• Spatial analysis and spatial planning
• Regional development
• Social facility spatial provision guidelines
• Facility provision calculation tools for settlement planning projects
• Accessibility modelling for improved facility location planning
• Urban morphological analyses

Remote sensing and GIS

• Crime science, elevation models, logistics, standards, urban and regional planning
• Raster and vector-based geo-information
• Spatial analytical methods and spatial statistics

Housing, Neighborhoods, and cities

• Why Housing is Important and Its Intrinsic Nature
• House as Home and Commodity
• Housing and the Political Economy of Urbanization

Housing as an Object of Policy

• Slums and Early Intervention into Housing
•  History of Intervention into Housing and Comparison to Other Nations
• Givings and Takings, Land Use Regulations, and Suburbs
• Race, Poverty, and Opportunity