Results are presented from a survey of North American graduate planning programs to assess curricular specialization in land use planning.Documentation studied included catalogs, program descriptions, and syllabi for courses identified as part of a land use specialization. Of the sample of fifty-seven schools, 65% have declared such a specialization, with a mean of ten land use-related courses offered. A typology of course types emerged, as a basis for summarizing the survey data and comparing the programs. The survey is presented as one source of evidence useful in designing appropriate subcurricula in land use, along with information about current professional practice. Donald Miller and Frank Westerlund are, respectively, Professor and Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Miller's research includes urban spatial structure and planning evaluation. Professor Westerlund directs the Remote Sensing Applications Laboratory and teaches land use, environmental planning, and GIS. IntroductionLand use planning was for many years the major focus of planning curricula across the United States. With the growth of subject matter in the field of city planning, most faculties responded by developing a number of areas of concentration or specialization within the field, often in the form of subcurricula from among which students could elect after they had completed a major portion of the core curriculum required for a master's in urban planning. While many planning programs offer a specialization in land use planning, there has been no recent systematic assessment of how these programs define and structure their subcurricula dealing with this aspect of professional work. Consequently, we contacted all ACSP member schools in the spring of 1987, requesting documentation such as catalogs, program descriptions, and course outlines and reading lists for courses which they identified as being part of their land use area of specialization or concentration.In all, we received fifty useful responses from U.S. schools of planning and information from seven Canadian schools (Table 1), about 70% of the graduate planning programs in North America. A few responding schools were deleted for lack of a graduate program, or stated lack of instruction in land use planning. The sample, however, was not restricted to programs having a formalized area of specialization in land use planning since our aim was to discern the entire range of curricular approaches. The sample includes a few schools which offer graduate planning programs within nontraditional academic units such as geography, civil engineering, and urban studies.Using a standardized format, we summarized information for each school having a declared area of specialization in land use planning, including the title definition of these areas, the number of land use-related courses in at MOUNT ALLISON UNIV on June 15, 2015 jpe.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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