Master of Urban and Regional Planning
Overview
The Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program seeks to identify social needs and environmental capacities, anticipate change and its impact on communities, and shape the pattern of human settlements. In short, your studies will focus on making a positive and lasting impact on the lives of people, both in Colorado and around the globe.
Every society throughout history has addressed the same fundamental questions--which urban and regional planners have the ability to help answer:
- Where should settlements be located?
- What economic, social and political activities fit what places and spaces?
- By what measures should the performance of cities and regions be judged--equity? efficiency? sustainability? diversity? beauty? utility?
- How do urban places and rural regions connect with the wider spaces and more expansive networks that compose the global space-economy?
The MURP program is a fully accredited two-year graduate professional degree program that has maintained this standing over many periodic reviews conducted by the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB). It is a "national" program, drawing students from many states and abroad, and sending its graduates on to serve an equally vast geography. View the overview of the MURP Curriculum here
Areas of Concentration
The concentrations and elective courses enable you to explore in depth an area of special interest and tailor your educational experience to your own particular needs and aspirations. You will often find it advantageous to build on the expertise that you already possess. This can be done either by focusing on a related specialty or by increasing your depth of mastery in a previously acquired area of expertise.
The program supports three official concentrations:
- Economic and Community Development Planning
- Land Use and Environmental Planning
- Urban Place Making
A set of foundation courses is identified in each concentration, plus additional electives, for a total of 15 credits.
Objectives
Planning's mission is to identify the root causes of urban and regional problems; to fashion strategies that deploy policies, plans, resources, and regulatory approaches to create urban and regional environments suited to human and ecological needs; and to develop methods for evaluating the human and environmental consequences of urban problems, programs, policies and plans.
Through research our faculty members have emerged as national, even global leaders in addressing some of the most vexing problems of the field, regionally, nationally and internationally. Through study you will gain first-hand experience with real-world challenges while addressing essential theories and state-of-the-art methodologies of the field.
As a graduate, you will have the ability to advance to positions of great responsibility in Colorado, across the nation, and abroad, in both the public and private sectors, in planning per se, and in related fields as well. University of Colorado Denver graduates continue to maintain a very high pass rate on the national examination administered for entry into the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP).
The essential tasks of planning require a high order of ability to:
- Amass and manipulate information
- Represent and model essential phenomena and processes
- Stimulate alternative futures and judge outcomes having diverse dimensions
- Portray and communicate key concepts
- Harness knowledge about all the key actors on the scene in order to elicit their input and to understand their needs
Succinctly put, the education of planners can only begin in the university. It must be a life-long pursuit, and planning programs are becoming increasingly supportive of the continuing education needs of professionals. It is the intellectual excitement of this ongoing pursuit of knowledge that draws many to the field -- this, and the opportunity to change the world.