Urban and Environmental Planning – BA (Honours)

At a glance

Learn how to plan, deliver and maintain well-designed spaces in town, cities and the countryside. You gain a broad understanding of planning in theory and practice and specialise in regeneration, environmental planning or design. Field trips in the UK and overseas and real world projects develop your skills and knowledge ready for the workplace.

Key points• Gain a broad knowledge of planning and specialise in regeneration, environmental planning or design.
• Go on residential field courses to London, Germany and the Netherlands.
• Develop your skills on a range of live projects in and around the city.
• Choose from three options for completing your Royal Town Planning Institute professional accreditation.

What is urban and environmental planning?Planning is concerned with creating sustainable and attractive places where present and future generations can live better lives. Planners today combine analytical, creative, design and communication skills to work out what development we need, where it should go, how it should be designed and help deliver it on the ground.

This course

Understand the social, economic, political and environmental processes that shape cities and regions and the various ways in which planning can improve the quality of places and peoples’ lives. This course is really about making a positive difference and will appeal to you if you are curious about your surroundings and keen to influence the way our environment is developed and conserved.

On this course, you develop the theoretical understanding and practical skills needed to plan, deliver and critically appraise well-designed places. You learn how to protect, improve and regenerate the environment in our towns, cities and countryside.

As well as gaining a broad knowledge of planning, you enhance your career prospects in an area that particularly interests you by specialising in either regeneration, environment or design.

You attend lectures which engage with the theory about planning and its interactions with the natural, built and human environment. These are followed by seminars and workshops where you can discuss ideas and apply them in practice. Your coursework is varied and involves • writing essays • analysing and presenting data • preparing posters • doing design briefs • making policy • assessing the impacts of development.

In preparation for your career, it’s important for you to gain a hands-on understanding of what you’re studying. That’s why your classroom activity includes developing important skills such as working on geographical informational systems (GIS), Photoshop, spatial analysis and site analysis. These technical skills are supplemented by site visits, day trips and residential field courses to London and Freiburg in Germany.

Your studies are supported by facilities such as our resources room, where you can go for printing, accessing maps and storing subject-specific material. You also have access to our map room which contains networked computers running specialist software, such as ArcGIS and ENVI.

Our planning tutors have worked in most areas of planning, so we are well placed for linking theory to practice, bringing in a range of outside speakers and having real world projects for you to work on. For example using plans for the development of a huge area of derelict land near Staveley in North East Derbyshire to explore ideas around planning and design for the environment.

You also have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learnt in a professional setting with either a period of work-based learning or one year placement. This is a great chance to choose a career path and improve your employment and starting salary prospects when you graduate.

As we are members of the international Erasmus programme you can study abroad in Europe for part of your course. We also have similar links with universities in other countries including Australia and Canada.

We co-host the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Yorkshire Conference series giving you the opportunity to mix with practitioners and engage in extra learning. Recent day conferences have focused on climate change and renewable energy, urban design and delivering infrastructure.

Key areas of studyKey areas include • history, theory and concepts of planning and design • planning processes • design and delivery • regeneration • urban design • environmental planning.

Gaining full Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) accreditation
To gain full accreditation you need to do a year of postgraduate level study. You can do this through the following routes.

• At the end of your first year of this course, transfer onto the Master in Urban and Environmental Planning. It is the same course but with an additional year of study which prepares you for practice and is fully accredited by the RTPI.

• After graduating, do the final year of the Master in Urban and Environmental Planning as a Postgraduate Diploma in Urban and Environmental Planning.

• After graduating do the MSc in Urban Regeneration.