We expect our graduates to provide the vision and ideas that will transform the field of urban and regional planning. We train people who will know why and when to plan and how to determine the best plan in a particular situation. We therefore focus on concepts and frameworks for action and on understanding and critiquing techniques and methods. We have a faculty that embodies interdisciplinarity. We emphasize learning planning by doing planning.
Students work on projects with community partners and planning clients in many of their courses.
Many other classes incorporate projects that result in products useful to community groups working on planning issues. We encourage internships and offer many of these through departmental grants for jobs integrated with course work. This location offers urban and regional planning students an enormous range of opportunities for working on planning issues. In Detroit they deal with housing, transportation access, open space reuse, commercial and industrial revitalization, and other issues facing a city that has lost half its population since 1953 and whose residents experience high rates of poverty. We are part of one of the nation's great universities.