Winter 2026 Graduate Planning Timetable

Courses marked with an asterisk (*) are offered through affiliated departments. Please contact the host department for enrolment instructions.  

Geography & Planning students have priority enrolment for courses. Course enrolment for students from other departments is available online via Acorn on August 22, 2025.  

For JPG courses, the department does not require any forms from students outside the department – if space is available students are welcome to enroll using ACORN. If space is not available, students will be added to the enrolment waitlist. If your home department requires a signature in order to approve your enrollment please send the form by email to graduate.planning@utoronto.ca (for JPG courses).  

Core PLA courses are restricted to planning students only. Priority for all other PLA courses will be for students in the planning program. Students from other programs must contact the department for permission to enrol – we will consider requests starting mid-August.  

Students can access course materials on Quercus.  

Building locations for STG can be found on the STG campus map. 

Winter session courses begin on January 5, 2026 and end on April 6, 2026. 

Concentration column indicates the MScPl Concentration to which the elective may be applied; students are welcome to consult the concentration advisors about the relationship between a particular course and a concentration, if they wish to take courses outside the department toward completion of their concentrations, and/or if a particular course is not being offered and they wish to find a substitute appropriate for a concentration. 

Course Descriptions

PLA1103H - Legal Basis of Planning

This course examines the underlying source law and legal principles that govern land use planning in Ontario, including the relevant legislation, regulations, by-laws, and policy. You will learn about the role of the courts and administrative tribunals (with emphasis on the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal), how to distinguish between law and policy, and how to effectively read, understand and apply adjudicated decisions. Over the first half of the course, you will be introduced to the basic framework in which the province, municipalities, and other entities exercise their respective authority to create, interpret and enforce planning law and policy. While the primary focus will be on the Planning Act, we will also explore the scope of municipal powers and governance structures under the Municipal Act, 2001 and the City of Toronto Act, 2006. We will then work through the process, rights, and obligations underlying the development application and appeal process, first in the context of major policy and zoning amendments and plans of subdivision, and then in relation to minor variances and severances. You will be asked to apply some of the law and substantive information gleaned through these lectures in a mock Committee of Adjustment hearing setting. The second half of the course will feature more in-depth examinations of some of the interesting, complex, and significant planning issues facing industry stakeholders at this time. We will address the duty to consult with aboriginal communities and the framework for protecting cultural heritage resources, land expropriations, and the various charges and levies imposed as part of the development application process, the legal tools for securing affordable housing and the protection of employment lands. Some of the issues discussed in these lectures may generate ideas for your research paper due at the end of the term.

PLA1106Y - Workshop in Planning Practice

Workshop in Planning Practice is designed to help students develop and exercise planning competencies by undertaking a planning project as part of a team. Students gain experience in project management while applying research and decision methods taught in previous courses in the core curriculum of the Master of Science in Planning program. Above all, students have the opportunity to cultivate skills and etiquette that will be expected of them should they pursue a career in planning or a related discipline. In this course, each student is assigned to a team and each team is assigned a unique planning question typical of those that planning practitioners face in this region at this time, which has been posed by a 'client' organization. At the end of term, each team presents an executive summary of their report with question-and-answer period to a semi-public audience of classmates, project clients, project stakeholders, course instructors, and invited guests. Reports must include research, analysis, recommendations, and conclusions that lay out solutions or a conceptual framework to address the research question. Recommendations may rely on regulatory, administrative, programmatic, or design approaches, taking into account available mechanisms for change, as well as the social, political, economic, and environmental context. By placing students in a simulated professional setting, this course provides hands-on experience working with the concepts, methods, and theories taught in core courses and concentration gateway courses completed earlier in the program. In this way, it enables students to "bridge the imagined gap between theory and practice" along with other core aims of the Graduate Planning Program Mission Statement.

PLA1107Y - Current Issues Paper

The Current Issues Paper (CIP) is intended to help you make the transition from the academic world to the professional world of planning. It should demonstrate that you understand and can explain the complexities of a specific planning issue; that you can identify, analyze, and present relevant context and facts; and that you can take a position on the issue and argue for it effectively. The CIP is also intended to help you bring together theories, ideas, and skills acquired over the course of the planning program. You are encouraged to apply them to real-world contexts for planning to bridge (imagined) gaps between theory and practice. Your project should also consider the key aims of the planning program which include a "commitment to humane city-regions, healthy environments, and social well-being for everyone (especially, for those who have been historically marginalized through traditional development practices)" as detailed in the program mission. In particular, the course emphasizes addressing issues of anti-BIPOC racism and is committed to pursuing equity and racial justice in planning.

PLA1601H - Environmental Planning in a Changing Climate

The scope of environmental planning has expanded significantly in recent decades beyond its initial focus on wilderness preservation or environmental impact management. It includes planning for climate change adaptation, resiliency, disaster recovery, and transitions to a just green economy. However, the profession grapples with enduring problems like planning for green spaces in marginalized communities, developing and retrofitting infrastructure for clean water provision, stormwater management, and waste disposal, addressing pollution and hazardous waste disposal and preventing sprawl. In addition, global interconnections have complicated the scope of problems that must be addressed and created opportunities for learning and cooperation across contexts. This course introduces students to key concepts, issues, tools, practices, and controversies in environmental planning in the North American context with examples, comparisons, and interconnections drawn from international cases in selected modules. Through course materials, students will confront planning's culpability in contributing to environmental racism and learn about radical alternatives that propose just and transformative change. The course largely focuses on urban regions, but we will critically approach issues and corresponding solutions to question their possibilities and limits in a global, interconnected world confronting the growing impacts of climate change. This course actively centers on the aims of the Graduate Planning Program Mission. It enables students to examine the tensions and synergies between theory and practice in the subfield of environmental planning. It also equips students to develop planning ideas that envision "sustainable, accessible, beautiful, and just" places.

PLA1651H - Planning and Real Estate Development

This course provides an overview of the real estate development industry, the development process and, of course, the planning process. It covers the financial basis for development projects, the participants, the market search procedures and the financing of development. It also addresses the interface of the industry with the public sector. The purpose of this course is to provide students with a fundamental background and basic skill set to understand the real estate development business and its interrelationships with urban planning. It will provide students with an introduction to the major disciplines and processes related to development, which can provide a basis for the pursuit of a career in the development field or simply an understanding of the mindset of the developer. The course attempts to provide some understanding of the complexity surrounding real estate development and will introduce a level of quantitative and qualitative thinking sufficient to deal with the myriad of decisions that confront the real estate developer. The objective of the course is to enable students to think critically about real estate development. This is not so much a course in facts as it is a course in thinking, learning, and adapting to the forces shaping the real estate development industry and planning.

PLA1653H - Advanced Studio in Urban Design and Planning

This course is an advanced version of PLA1652H. Emphasis will be placed on research applications to urban design, and the use of computer-generated images for design and presentation purposes.

PLA1751H - Public Finance for Planners

The purpose of this course is to introduce planning students to current issues in municipal finance in Canada and around the world, provide basic economic tools to analyze municipal public finance problems, and emphasize the important role that municipal finance plays in planning decisions.

JPG1130H - Qualitative Data Analytics: Coding, Interpreting, and Writing Qualitative Research

This course will train students to analyze qualitative data and write up findings from their research. It is designed for students who have already taken a qualitative methods course that provides training on data collection, such as interviewing, ethnographic observation, conducting focus groups, or discourse analysis. Our course will focus exclusively on the data analysis and writing phase and will help students to work with and interpret their data.

This course will introduce qualitative data analysis as a collaborative process that happens through intensive engagement, sharing, and revising of one's ideas and arguments. Thus, the class will involve a series of workshop and writing activities. Students will comment on each other’s work in class and through written peer-review exercises. Conceptualizing qualitative research as a community effort, we will spend significant time learning how to provide and receive helpful feedback and build peer support networks while in grad school.

JPG1400H - Advanced Quantitative Methods

Spatial Analysis consists of set of techniques used for statistical modeling and problem solving in Geography. As such, it plays an integral role in the detection of spatial processes and the identification of their causal factors. It is therefore a key component in one’s preparation for applied or theoretical quantitative work in GIScience, Geography, and other cognate disciplines. Space, of course, is treated explicitly in spatial analytical techniques, and the goal of many methods is to quantify the substantive impact of location and proximity on human and environmental processes in space.

JPG1428H - Greening the City: Urban Environmental Planning and Management

This course focuses on the recent efforts to 'green the city' by integrating green infrastructure into the built environment, including emerging research supporting such initiatives. The course begins by examining greening goals associated with ecosystem service provisioning, individual and community well-being, environmental justice, and urban resiliency in light of climate change. The role of urban planners, municipal policy, private property owners, and other key actors will be examined in-depth. Throughout the course, issues associated with bridging knowledge gaps between the social and natural sciences, unique characteristics of urban ecosystems, and the role of specific decision-makers will be considered.

JPG1429H - Political Ecology of Food and Agriculture

Agrifood systems, connecting production and consumption, markets and various types of agrarian labour, are undergoing profound social and ecological change. In trying to make sense of these changes, and the various social movements that have e merged in their wake, this course deploys the related paradigms of agrarian political economy and political ecology to analyze the forces and social relations that define land-based and food-focused transformations, both historically and in the contemporary moment. The course examines the often forgotten roots of contemporary debates in political ecology and food, that is, the enduring agrarian question. The agrarian question examines the extent to which capital has transformed agricultural production and the degrees to which producers have been able to resist dispossession and the industrialization and capitalization of agriculture. The course starts with foundational perspectives on the agrarian question, the renaissance of these debates in the 1970s and 1980s and the emergence during this time of political ecology as a critical approach to the study of food and land- based practices. The course also tackles a number of defining contemporary developments that are reshaping the meaning and character of land and food.

JPG1504H - Institutionalism and Cities: Space, Governance, Property, and Power

This course focuses on the role of institutions (defined as shared norms and understandings, standard operating practices, and enforceable rules) in structuring processes of urban change, urban governance, and spatial planning. The premise of the course is that cities are extraordinarily institutionalized spaces, and that a careful study of institutions, and of processes of institutional continuity and change, will be valuable for both planners and urban geographers. The course reviews the New Institutionalist literature in Political Science, Sociology, and Planning Theory, with a focus on Historical Institutionalism (HI) and Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA) and develops a conceptual framework for the application of HI theory to urban governance and planning.

JPG1511H - The Commons: Geography: Planning, Politics

The commons are natural or technological resources or social and cultural spaces shared among members of a community. Different communities may adopt different practices to manage a commons, or also co-create commons via processes of commonning. This course addresses three basic empirical puzzles in governing the environmental commons: one, why are some actors able to create functional institutions for managing the commons, while many others fail to do so? Two, are there trade-offs between sustainable commons governance and commons governance that is equitable and inclusive, of so, what are they? Three, how do social, economic, and political inequalities shape who has access to and control over the commons? Through the lens of these questions, the course explores the contextual conditions and institutions structuring human interactions that make for just and sustainable governance.

JPG1554H - Transportation and Urban Form

The need to reduce automobile dependence and congestion has been argued widely in recent years, and urban form has been identified as a major aspect influencing choice of travel mode. The combined imperatives of sustainability, healthier cities, and worsening congestion has prompted an increasingly rich body of research on the relationships between urban form, transport infrastructure, and travel patterns, and an array of new methodological approaches to research them. This course critically examines this research and examines planning strategies that seek to influence travel through coordinated transport investment and land use and design control. Both regional and neighbourhood scale issues and strategies will be addressed. The geographic focus of the course will largely be metropolitan regions in Canada and the United States, but there will be opportunity to examine other national contexts.

JPG1615H - Planning the Social Economy

What would it take to build a 'social economy,' an economy rooted in the principles of social justice, democratic governance and local self-reliance? What are the progressive and regressive implications of such an undertaking? This course explores these questions both theoretically and practically: theoretically, with recourse to some canonical and more recent writings about the interface between 'society' and 'economy'; practically, by looking at what role municipal governments could and do play in building the social economy. The course will also consider how communities and neighbourhoods are growing increasingly active in developing alternative economic institutions, such as cooperatives, participatory budgets, and community development financial institutions in order to institutionalize the social economy at the local scale.

JPG1812Y - Planning for Change: Community Development in Practice

This is a full-year service-learning course that facilitates practical experience in community-engaged planning. Service-learning is a reciprocal work placement between students and community partners. Students are placed with a public or non-profit sector organization for one day per week, on average, from early October to late March to work in community development and planning. Placement organizations practice a range of planning-related work, including housing, transportation, social planning, and environmental initiatives. We meet as a class in a seminar format to support the students' work, reflect on theory and practice, and to learn from one another’s experiences. This placement can fulfil Master of Sciece in Planning students' internship requirement.

JPG1813H - Social Planning and Policy

The world is seeing a clear resurgence of the urgency of directly and explicitly addressing the needs of equity deserving groups in a way that builds on but goes beyond the remit of identity politics. Key to a justice approach to social policy and planning is understanding how policy shapes a landscape of inclusion and exclusion and how ordinary people come to be "read," rightly or wrongly, as particular subjects based on the prescriptive aspects of policy. We are now at a moment when diverse social movements are beginning to take upon themselves the reimagining or promotion of much more ambitious alternative modes of governance, which would replace rather than simply amend existing structures. This can be found in widespread calls the redesign of institutional landscapes, from defunding of the police to expansive programs of truth and reconciliation. This course calls upon us to rethink participation, consultation, experiential knowledge and our engagement with existing power structures — this is not the moment to abandon social planning, but the time to reinvent it.

JPG1816H - Muslim Geographies

Secularism is a key principle of Western modernity and an epistemic framework that shapes our understanding of the political legitimacy of bodies, spaces, nations, and borders in the contemporary world. While rooted in the social and political legacies of Enlightenment philosophy, secularism has become more contested in relation to the heightened visibility of Islam, Muslim identities, and cultural practices in the second half of the 20th century. In this course, we critically explore the geographies of secularism and the key debates around concepts of secularity, religion and secularization from feminist, post-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives with a focus on Islam and the Islamic world. Starting with the genealogy of secularism rooted in Western colonialism, we will explore the currency and spatiality of 'religious' and 'secular' in relation to Muslim identities and cultural practices in Muslim majority contexts and in the cities of the Global North.

JPG1825H - Black Geographies of the Atlantic

Beyond a physical region, the Atlantic can be understood as a site through which techniques for the exploitation of land, people, and the environment emerged, with enduring implications for world trajectories. This course traces a genealogy of contested spacetimes spanning the colonial state, the plantation, and urban neighborhoods and streets. We learn about representations of Blackness as they are made and remade through time such as: the "dangerous Blacks" of the Haitian revolution; the British West Indian ex-slave "unwilling" to work; a sanitized version of the Black small farmer; the anti-colonialist land invader; and the "illegal squatter" who is no longer recognized as a descendant of Black refusal. Among the traditions we explore are rebellion, revolution, and quotidian acts of place-making through farming, fishing, street vending, beauty services, taxi operation, masquerade, and dwelling. Through these representations and practices we explore the epistemologies of this ongoing encounter and also work to uncover the gendering of complex racial formations.

JPG1909H - Advanced Space-time Data Analysis and Visualization

This course is designed for graduate students in a workshop format with a focus on both theories and applications of space-time data analysis and visualization. Topics may include space-time data collection, processing, analysis, and visualization, as well as theories and applications of up-to-date GIS analysis methods and the newly developed data mining techniques. Gaining practical experience using real-world datasets, students will learn the necessary knowledge and various tools for space-time data analysis and visualization. The course encompasses theoretical instruction and practical training in GIS programming and software with the use of multiple space-time datasets that may include GPS trajectory data, Geotagged social media data, and others.