The Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College educates students to be change-oriented leaders in the planning profession and academy and conducts research informed by a commitment to improve the fairness, prosperity, and environmental and social sustainability of neighborhoods, cities, regions, and mega-regions.

The Global and Comparative Planning concentration provides students with the opportunity to examine the interconnected social, cultural, and political-economic processes that frame patterns of urban development and planning in the United States and abroad. Students learn to think creatively and critically analyze the design and implementation of planning initiatives from a comparative and global perspective, which recognizes the importance of confronting unequal power relations and social injustices of various scales.

We welcome collaborations on studies and action research opportunities in any of our areas of strength: urban design, participatory budgeting, informal settlements, urban food systems, health planning, spatial politics, and urban governance. Collectively, our faculty have worked in many countries, but we have the strongest networks in South Africa, Brazil, Bolivia and Haiti.

In addition to research collaborations, our faculty are interested in forming long-term partnerships to work with communities on participatory action research projects as part of capstone projects carried out with second-year masters of urban planning students.

One specific planning education project our program is involved with currently is the International Planning Case Study Project. Fall of 2015, the Co-PIs, Lesli Hoey (University of Michigan) and Andrew Rumbach (University of Colorado, Denver), will be launching a website that will offer educators access to a series of case studies developed in collaboration with international planning practitioners, for use with students through a peer-learning, dialogical approach. The goal of the project is to offer planning and international development educators tools to help them bring practice to the classroom, to better prepare professional planning and development practitioners to work in low-income country settings. We welcome educators to use the free resources we will provide and, if interested, to support our efforts to evaluate and compare the efficacy of our pedagogical model across diverse educational settings.

• Water
• Social Inclusion
• Slum Upgrading
• Safety
• Resilience
• Planning and Design
• Legislation
• Land
• Information and Monitoring
• Housing
• Governance
• Evaluation
• Environment
• Economy
• Climate Change
• Capacity Development

• Informal Urbanism
• Safer Cities
• Urban Accessibility
• Urban Governance
• Urban Form