Each concentration area requires 12 credits: a core course, a studio, and two elective courses particular to the area. The capstone project also is typically in the selected concentration area.

Each concentration area is affiliated with one or more research/public service institutes of the college and university and a primary venue in Muncie or Indianapolis. With faculty approval, students also may pursue a customized course of study.

Comprehensive Planning
The comprehensive plan constitutes the planner's central public role. The planner's commitment is to interdisciplinary problem solving that includes both the short and long-term.  The comprehensive plan provides a frame of reference within which a city, town, county or even a regional collection of such bodies, can make decisions – decisions about how to spend public resources, where to encourage development and where to discourage it, where to invest in new infrastructure, and how to regulate private land use and development.  The comprehensive plan weaves together the process of physical analysis of the natural and human-made environments with the multiple goals of the many constituencies who inhabit and depend upon the community for which the plan is developed.  Although the comprehensive plan itself typically emphasizes the physical and fiscal tools to be used by the community to implement it, the policies within the plan are guided by socio-economic factors and by social needs, as well as by the physical context.  Comprehensive Planning draws broadly on many of the planning methods courses offered in the curriculum and is informed by a century of planning theory that have evolved with the practice in the United States.  Comprehensive Planning also draws on specialized tools such as GIS (for analysis), modeling (for examining possible futures), survey techniques (for analysis of public needs and desires) and urban design in some contexts.  View curriculum for this ACS.

Physical Planning

Physical Planning is land use planning at the site level.  The site may be as small as a city block in a redevelopment district or as large as a regional watershed management area.  Physical Planning includes site selection, site suitability analysis, development impact analysis, and mitigation.  Such assessment results in a better design for the site and in remediation measures; accordingly, plans for development or preservation of the site evolve in the context of that physical analysis.  Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other techniques for dealing with information spatially are essential tools in Physical Planning.  Physical Planners also must use modeling techniques to understand how roads, utilities and other public systems will be affected by future development.  The visioning tools include urban design and the variety of site planning techniques.  The work of Physical Planners may be within either public or private sectors.  It may result in a range of appropriate design responses from adaptive reuse of defunct facilities, to urban renewal, to new town planning, and mindful of planning's commitment to environmental sustainability, land stewardship, and effective design.  View curriculum for this ACS.

Community Development and Enterprise Planning

The ultimate purpose of planning is the development of land in the public interest.  Simply, plans in the public interest are made useful if they are implemented.  Traditionally, the channel for this is community development, and this remains our focus.  Community development shifts the focus of planners to community organization, to neighborhoods, towns and cities in distress, and to action plans that guide a vision through a process of implementation.   Yet, action plans cry for actions, and thus the emerging role of enterprise planning and its focus on development.   This field infuses the real estate development process with the values of planning, and renders both more sophisticated and effective.  This field demands the partnering of players in all three economic sectors: for profit land developers, financiers and both professional and industry entities; nonprofit community development corporations, affordable housing sponsors and other such public interest organizations; and public agencies, serving as regulator or partner in the enterprise.  This field focuses on inducement and action, on risk-taking and the rewards of an ambitious enterprise, providing public benefits while addressing the bottom line for each participant group.  The development process for the entrepreneurial planner requires high levels of innovation and sound judgment, negotiation in forming strategic alliances, the ability to control events, technical knowledge of site assessment, finance, marketing, and project management, and the quality of perseverance.  Public-private partnerships, development that is community or neighborhood-based, affordable housing, economic development and downtown revitalization, and private development guided by the public interest are all subsets of the Concentration in Enterprise & Community Development Planning. View curriculum for this ACS.

Customized Urban Planning Area
With faculty approval a student may also puruse a customized area of concentrated study.  View curriculum for this ACS.

For More Information
David Schoen, Acting Chair
Department of Urban Planning
(765) 285-1963
murp@bsu.edu

For complete information on program requirements, please consult the Ball State University Graduate Catalog.