We all make plans.  Businesses, families, individuals, governments, and private organizations all use plans to guide their decisions.  If you are reading this, you are probably making plans to enter college or to go back to college for a graduate degree.  In the Department of Urban Planning, you can obtain an accredited, professional planning degree that prepares you to help communities to make plans for their futures or to assist other organizations in participating in the growth and change of communities. The most obvious work of urban planners is in shaping the physical future of the community – planning new road and other transportation systems, ensuring that schools and parks will be available to serve new neighborhoods, guiding new residential development into suitable areas, creating programs to protect valuable natural resources, encouraging the revitalization of downtowns, and creating a pleasing urban context in which residents can enjoy their quality of life.   Although most people associate the work of planners with changes in the physical environment, the day to day work of planners focuses on people.  Creating plans for a community requires understanding the hopes, desires, concerns, fears, frustrations and aspirations of the people who make that community.  Thus, planners meet with people individually in the office, with small groups around the community, and with the public at large in formal meetings.  Planners work with developers, builders, environmentalists, farmers, preservationists and average citizens who simply care about the future of the community.  The motto of the American Planning Association is "Making Great Communities Happen." 

We prepare for these challenges by offering a rigorous course of study for the Bachelor and Master degrees, both of which are accredited by the Planning Accreditation Board .

Our program has a very practical orientation.  Our graduates will be professional planners, working for local governments, developers or consulting firms.  We thus use a studio model of education that gives students extensive hands-on experience in both real and simulated planning projects.   Most of our faculty members have worked as professional planners, and some of us remain active as professionals outside the classroom.  Although our name includes the word "urban," one of the great strengths of the department deals with rural and small-town issues.  Other particular areas of strength include land-use and physical planning, environmental planning, neighborhood planning, and planning for economic development.  We incorporate into our shared curriculum with architecture and landscape architecture an international program of study in Europe, on the Indian sub-continent, and in China, Mexico, and various venues in Australia,  and South America.  Our Indianapolis Center offers additional opportunities for learning in context. 

Muncie itself is a fascinating learning environment for future planners.  It is a community that has suffered from the loss of industrial jobs that has affected most of the Midwest, but it is very much on the rebound.  A revitalized (and still building) downtown is home to a growing "creative class" in the community, and faculty and students in the department have been actively involved in community development efforts in neighborhoods and areas that are making their own comeback. 

Most important, our faculty members are all here because they want to teach.  Although most of us engage in research or creative activity and several of us publish our work, our first priority is teaching and our focus is on students.

This is a great time to be involved in urban or community planning at Ball State.  Review the materials on our website.  Then, if you have questions, feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Eric Damian Kelly
Professor
ekelly@bsu.edu
(765) 285-1963