The Educational Setting
Excellence in a graduate curriculum is a matter of context and necessary knowledge. The context of a curriculum is determined by the faculty - its skills, interests, and intellectual energy; by students who are part of the program; by relationships the program has to other programs and the profession; and by resources, both in and outside the University, available to students. The context is the vehicle that delivers; that shapes, excites, unites, instills, and defines the field for the student.

Studying planning and urban design at the University of Washington is enhanced by the degree program's location in a college containing architecture, landscape architecture, and building construction. The diversity of the University itself, one of the country's leading research institutions, is a significant resource of courses and faculty for the planning student. Also reflected in the curriculum is the program's situation in the Pacific Northwest's largest metropolitan area, Seattle, and the Puget Sound Region. Professional expertise and first-hand training are available to students in a wide variety of planning and urban design roles.

Requiring a core of courses in the planning curriculum is based on the premise that despite a rather wide range of bona fide professional activities that constitute urban planning, there are some subjects that all should hold in common. As a consequence, the curriculum is designed to provide for a shared set of experiences and material for all students in the program. However, we believe that excellence in planning education is not just getting the right subjects on the table. In this integrative field educational excellence cannot be measured only by the availability of significant areas of course work. Rather, it is a matter of providing a framework for the future professional; a framework of relationships to enable the professional to grow and change as does the field. It is faculty pointing out connections in terms of history, values, basic ways of approaching problems and the roles that various substantive areas and specializations have within this field and with other fields. For this reason, the program emphasizes activities of teaching, exemplifying, advising, and linking so that the experience of becoming educated in urban design and planning is as meaningful and exciting as the context of the courses.