Planning, Policy & Design
WELCOME FROM THE DEPARTMENT CHAIR
Welcome to the Department of Planning, Policy, and Design at the University of California, Irvine. Students and faculty here are part of a distinctive, energetic community that has achieved international and national prominence by combining top research while fostering an intellectual culture that values discovery, teaching, and professional and public service.
Established in 1993 as the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, the department has quickly built a reputation for leading-edge scholarship in many fields. UC Irvine faculty members are top contributors to leading journals, serve as editors or editorial board members on numerous periodicals, and regularly publish with many of the foremost presses, including Oxford University Press, MIT Press, the University of California Press, and Johns Hopkins University Press – among others.
Our faculty members are also strongly committed to forging links between theory and practice, and research and public service. They regularly advise federal agency committees, including those reporting to the National Research Council; national, state, and local government officials; leaders of international organizations, and those who direct private and non-profit, non-governmental organizations.
In addition to our commitment to excellence in scholarship and public service, we offer graduate students the opportunity to study in small classes with exceptional access to faculty members. Teaching is highly valued – exemplified by the fact that many of our faculty members have won competitive awards for instruction and student mentoring. And, students have access to numerous internship and fellowship opportunities, as well as contact with visiting scholars through departmental-sponsored colloquia and seminars, as well as access to faculty and researchers in many other departments here at UCI – one of the nation’s top research universities – whose work embraces topics important to studies in the fields we embrace.
Our name – Planning, Policy, and Design – underscores and embodies our unique vision: to provide an innovative blending of the fields of public policy, urban and regional planning, and environmental design that allow us to creatively explore problems at the intersection of the natural and built environments; including community health and well-being, transportation, environmental quality, natural resources, housing, economic development, and threats to community integrity and security – among many others.
Our scholarship, teaching, and service ranges broadly – partly attested to by the various centers and institutes whose activities are supported by our faculty, and which provide numerous opportunities for student involvement in research and outreach which supplements classroom instruction, and the department’s numerous internship and fellowship opportunities.
These centers include the recently established Center on Inequality and Social Justice (CISJ); which affords students the opportunity to better understand the causes and effects of inequality, and what can be done to promote social and economic justice for all; the Community Outreach Partnership Center, affiliated with CISJ, which works to empower local communities on issues of education and community development; the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs, which promotes greater understanding of the challenges in building social capital in developing countries wrought by war, internecine violence, natural disaster, environmental degradation, and poverty; the Center for Organizational Research, which examines ways to improve organizations, and the Urban Water Research Center which focuses on ways to manage and protect that most vital, and increasingly threatened, of all natural resources – here in California and throughout the world.
We invite you to learn more about us by exploring our website, and by visiting the department in person. If you choose to pursue one of our excellent programs – our Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning program, which is regarded among the very best programs in planning in the U.S. – or our PhD in Planning, Policy and Design, which in its relatively short period of existence has achieved eminence by encouraging our students to acquire knowledge and skills that can be applied to addressing real-world policy problems, you will be joining a department which offers graduate education of the highest caliber. If you seek an innovative, dynamic and thriving leaning environment that produces leaders in the practice of urban and regional planning at the Masters level, as well as scholars equipped with leading edge research tools in our Doctoral program, consider what UCI’s Department of Planning, Policy and Design can offer you.
David L. Feldman
Chair, Department of Planning, Policy, and Design
