What Is: Urban Planning

In the next few decades, the world’s urban population is projected to swell by about 3 billion people, an unprecedented development that will present tremendous challenges for the field of urban planning. To meet these challenges, says Uwe Brandes, faculty director for the Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning at Georgetown University, today’s urban planners are drawing on a much broader and deeper set of skills than in the past.

“Urban planning is interdisciplinary,” Brandes says. “With its origins in architecture, engineering, economic and government, the contemporary practice also applies sociology, public health, ecology, finance, digitization, and systems modeling.”

Located in the heart of Washington, D.C., Georgetown’s program is “producing a new generation of city-builders and community developers who are focused on equitable, resilient, and sustainable outcomes that cities around the world desperately need,” Brandes says.

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