Urban and Regional Planning Program Research

The Urban and Regional Planning Program (URP) at the University of Michigan educates students for reform-oriented leadership in the planning profession and academy; conducts research informed by a commitment to improve the fairness, prosperity, and environmental and social sustainability of neighborhoods, cities, regions, and mega-regions; and serves the academic and broader communities in ways that harness the skills and commitments of its faculty, students, and staff.

Planning at Michigan seeks to shape place-based policy and design for social and racial equity, generate regionalist solutions to metropolitan problems, develop just and effective remedies for urban decline, and create human settlements that offer alternatives to environmentally consumptive land-development patterns. In our teaching, we strive for a productive balance between theory and practice, between classroom-based and hands-on learning, and between a well-founded core and in-depth specializations. We foster ongoing research, teaching and collaborative service with other units of TCAUP and the University as well as with the city of Detroit, the region and, indeed, the world.

URP research is distinctive in its emphasis on place-focused planning, its normative commitments based on positive investigations, its reform orientation, and its substantive attention to processes of regional development—including peripheral sprawl and the countering of center-city decline. Projects undertaken at the college add to our understanding of how cities and regions function, as well as to our knowledge of what kinds of efforts are effective in improving urban quality of life. These projects have addressed a wide range of problems: redevelopment of derelict urban land, women's changing roles in development, the interaction of transportation and urban design, the effectiveness of innovations in public transit, the effects of federal and state programs on urban economic opportunity, the impact of design and management strategies on urban safety, effective management of growth at urban fringes, infrastructure management in rapid-growth cities in developing countries, use of new mapping techniques to improve understanding of the interaction between the built and natural environments—among many others.

Current projects include an evaluation of the neighborhood impacts of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit; an assessment of community based organizations’ experience in promoting reuse of vacant, abandoned, or contaminated properties; planning for the Great Lakes megaregion. Urban and Regional Planning faculty are currently investigating issues including job accessibility in Detroit; effects of urban form and road configuration on driving; the intersection between economic development and workforce development policies; inter-metropolitan comparison of accessibilty for transportation planning; sustainable development in coastal Michigan; and growth and inequality in Bangkok and Metro Manila.