About Community Planning

Are you an activist? Do you want to empower communities so that they can expand opportunities, improve their quality of life, and redress injustice and inequality? Do you want to help communities analyze, strategize, and mobilize? Then the COMMUNITY PLANNING MAJOR IS FOR YOU!

The CPCS Community Planning Major is one of very few undergraduate planning programs in the United States. The program focuses on participatory approaches to planning with and for communities and groups that have at best been ignored and at worst harmed by prevailing planning and decision making practices.

The Community Planning Major emphasizes direct, first-hand work in community and agency situations. Students develop and demonstrate technical skills as well as the ability to analyze the political aspects and social values implicit in different approaches to community planning and management.

Community Planning students learn how to work with formal organizations and informal groups of people to assess needs and resources, set goals, develop and implement strategies and proposals for reaching these goals, predict impacts and evaluate results. Students in this major also develop the ability to compare and contrast different theories and methods of planning, in order to determine how to maximize community participation and power.