Designing and Assessing a Teaching Laboratory for an Integrated Land Use and Transportation Course

land use–transportation (LUT). A master’s degree in urban planning is aimed at training students for careers as planners. Yet classroom lectures offer few opportunities to gain hands-on experience with zoning codes, data analysis, geographic information systems (GIS), or the synthesizing of multiple planning issues into a polished presentation or report. To develop practice-oriented skills students need opportunities that challenge them to think through real-world planning issues, work with planning stakeholders outside a classroom, and practice valuable communication skills—a key aspect of a planner’s work. Too often such learning takes place after students have moved into a planning career, not during their graduate studies. Previous studies have surveyed planners about what skills recent graduates should have. At the top of nearly every survey are communication skills and the ability to navigate through the planning process (2–5). In practice, effective communication of planning goals and rationale is an integral bridge from planning knowledge to action. Treating the process of planning as part of the specialized knowledge planners need is part of reflective practice (6). Baum builds on reflective practice by arguing that the planning is a method of acting that can be learned only through doing. Yet he faults the academic training that planners receive for the failure to orient more courses toward planning practice as university programs “tacitly teach that planning is the same as research” (3, p. 21). This paper describes and analyzes the experience of a laboratory component of a LUT course at the University of Minnesota. The laboratory used student planning projects of air rights developments over freeway trenches in the Twin Cities, St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Air rights developments offer students a blank slate with which they evaluate, design, and propose site plans that require interdisciplinary skills and knowledge. Such developments also pose interesting constraints, such as how to knit new development into the existing community. At the end of the term, the students present their proposals to practitioners, community leaders, and local officials. The success of the course and lab in preparing students for planning careers was evaluated through a survey of the alumni about how central the course concepts and skills are to their current work. The next section of this paper reviews the planning education literature. Then air rights developments are described as viable planning exercises, followed by details of the course concepts and lab assignments. Two sections of analysis follow, first an evaluation of the student air rights projects, and then an analysis considering the success of the course and lab in light of the alumni survey. The final section concludes and offers some suggestions to improve the design and focus of LUT courses and labs. Designing and Assessing a Teaching Laboratory for an Integrated Land Use and Transportation Course