Urban & Regional Planning > General Information

General Information

The Field of Urban and Regional Planning

Urban and regional planning is a dynamic, evolving field that emerged out of the convergence of two concerns:

• the provision of urban infrastructure; and
• the initiation of social reform.

Today urban and regional planning has expanded to include the development, implementation and evaluation of a wide range of policies, while at the same time continuing its underlying focus on community well-being. Urban and regional planners, in both developing and developed countries, are specifically concerned with:

• the use of land in the city, in the suburbs, and in rural areas, and particularly with the transition from one use to another;
• potentially adverse impacts of human activities on a limited physical environment and the possible mitigation of those impacts;
• the design of the city and the surrounding region so as to facilitate the activities in which people need and desire to engage;
• settlement systems and the location of human activities in urban and regional space.
• identification of social needs and the design and provision of services and facilities to meet those needs;
• the distribution of resources, benefits and costs among people;
• the anticipation of change and its impact on how people do and can live;
• participation of citizens in planning processes which affect their future; and
• the way that choices are made, decisions implemented and actions evaluated, and the means by which those processes can be improved in urban and regional areas.

Department Overview

The Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP), a unit within the faculty of Social Sciences offers the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) degree, a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, a Certificate in Planning Studies and a Professional Certificate in Urban and Regional Planning as well as a limited number of undergraduate courses. Its faculty and students engage in both funded and non-funded research and community service. The Department emphasizes theory, methodology and practice in the following areas: community planning and social policy; environmental planning and natural resource management; urban and regional planning in Asia and the Pacific; and land use, transportation and infrastructure planning.

The Department is concerned with planning questions in the State of Hawaii and in the broader Asia-Pacific Region, and it:

• offers a multidisciplinary approach to planning education, recognizing in particular the important contributions to planning that can be made by the social and natural sciences and by the architectural, public health, social work and civil engineering professions;
• emphasizes extensive community involvement;
• engages in research focusing on application of planning methodologies and implementation of planning endeavors;
• recognizes the close relationship between urban and regional planning and politics;
• acknowledges the difficulty of resolving the value differences that lie at the heart of most planning problems; and
• appreciates both the importance and the elusiveness of critical concepts, such as "the public interest", to urban and regional planning.