Urban Planning McGill University

Overview

Urban Planning offered by McGill University is also the profession of those who facilitate this process. While the practice of planning is as old as the cities themselves, the Urban Planning profession is only about a century old. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, architects, landscape architects, engineers, government reformers, lawyers, public health specialists, and others joined forces to tackle the serious social and environmental problems of the industrial city. They created new techniques and institutions to improve living conditions and decision-making processes, with an eye to improving cities in terms of health, safety, efficiency, equity, beauty, identity, etc. Today, people who enter the profession come from diverse backgrounds as well, including the design professions, engineering and applied sciences, environmental and social studies, and other fields. Their challenge is to reinvent tools and procedures to meet new challenges in making cities socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. A key feature of planning education is learning to view issues in a multidisciplinary way, to manage processes of collaboration and of conflict, and to generate equitable and efficient solutions to complex problems of urban development.

Key facts

McGill University was the first institution in Canada to offer a full-time planning program starting in 1947. In 1972, the School of Urban Planning was created as a separate academic unit within the Faculty of Engineering. It shares a heritage building with the School of Architecture, right on the main open space of McGill’s Downtown campus. The primary objective of the Master of Urban Planning program is to educate professional urban planners for leadership in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. We rely in large part on project-based learning. The program also puts great emphasis on students doing policy-relevant research.

The School’s teaching and research activities pertain primarily to community planning; environmental policy and planning; international development planning; land-use planning and regulation; transportation and infrastructure planning; and urban design. These activities, which are conducted for the purpose of promoting better decision-making and improving human environments, often take place in partnership with other McGill departments (notably Architecture, Civil Engineering, Geography, and Law) and with units at other institutions in Montreal, across Canada, and abroad. The School uses Montreal and its region as its main teaching laboratory.

McGill's School of Urban Planning has a strong track record of contributing to the community and to the profession. It works with civil society as well as with government, at home and abroad, to understand urban challenges and to formulate policies and plans to meet them.