Welcome to the website of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. On this site you can find information about the faculty, our student organization FAPS, the undergraduate and graduate degree programs we offer, and scholarships and research assistantships that are available for our students. I encourage you to also look at our job and news postings, which are updated daily. The job and news postings are an excellent way to research just exactly what it is that planners do, what kind of jobs are out there, and what the current salaries for planners are. In addition, the Department of Urban and Regional Planning website contains links to other FAU and planning related sites that you might find helpful.

The Department strives to provide leadership in producing nationally significant research and in serving national and international planning and planning education. Our focus is on educating future practitioners and researchers to enter national and global practice as leaders in managing change, developing new policy frameworks, and guiding decision-makers toward an urban future that is environmentally, economically, and humanly beneficial. We are dedicated to excellence in teaching and research and provide our students with a wide array of opportunities during their stay at FAU.

An exciting opportunity for our graduate students is the Excellence in Planning Scholarship. Approximately 10 Excellence in Planning Scholarships are awarded each year. The scholarships are generally provided for a period of two years, during which time the student is expected to complete the graduate degree. The scholarships include a tuition waiver and a generous stipend ($13,000 a year for 2007/2008).  Excellence in Planning students have the opportunity to work 20 hours a week with faculty on research, are encouraged to present the results of their research at a conference, and submit an article about their research for publication. We are always looking for students that are up to the challenge. Minimum requirements are an undergraduate GPA of 3.2 and a minimum of 1200 on the GRE.  The scholarships are highly competitive and students should write a strong personal statement and submit two letters of recommendation. Deadline for application for the 2008 academic year is February 15, 2008. 

To broaden student exposure to innovative planning concepts, the Department has developed a Planning Abroad program which provides students with the opportunity to visit other places in the world.  Previously, the Planning Abroad program has introduced students to planning in Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Florence and Milan. This year, a group of students will be going to Germany to look at metropolitan form and redevelopment practices in Hamburg, Berlin and Lunenberg. We will also have an exchange program with the Technical University Vienna. In February, our students will have the opportunity to work with a group of faculty and students from the Technical University Vienna on an assessment of regional sub centers in southeast Florida. Then, in May, we will go to Vienna to work with those same students on the assessment of regional sub centers in the Vienna metropolitan area.

Another exciting opportunity is our Visual Planning Technology Lab , a state-of-the-art instructional, training, and research facility.  The VPT Lab performs advanced planning and policy research and was recently awarded a 3 year National Science foundation (NSF) grant for research on “Displacement due to Catastrophic Hurricanes: Assessing Potential Magnitude and Implications for Housing and Land Development Policies”.

There is much more going on in the Department and I invite you to explore the Department’s website and consider urban and regional planning as a possible career path. Don’t forget to check out the activities of our student planning organization, the award winning Florida Atlantic Planning Society (FAPS). FAPS is one of the most active student organizations at FAU. FAPS events include the Second Wednesday Lecture Series, Career Day, and the monthly North Fork waterway clean-ups, which are organized in cooperation with Broward County's Department of Planning and Environmental Protection and the Wildlife Research Team. FAPS also provides funding for student members to attend and participate in planning conferences and organizes numerous networking and social events.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the Department or any of the programs that we offer.

Jaap Vos
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Urban and Regional Planning