Comprehensive Impact Assessment in Planning Education and a Course Syllabus

Abstract

Impact assessment skills are used in a variety of ways in planning practice, reflecting expansion in society's concern with externalities associated with growth and development, improved methods for predicting impacts, and wider acceptance of impact mitigation as a goal of growth management. This article reviews the status of impact assessment in planning pedagogy and describes a new way of teaching this subject. At present, few planning education programs address development impact assessment in a comprehensive way. Instead, most curricula either have courses dedicated to teaching methods related to a few categories of impacts, such as environmental or fiscal, or treat impact assessment in passing in courses that cover broader subjects. Here I argue that a comprehensive impact assessment course can have several advantages, and I present the design of such a course and report on initial classroom experience with it. The course combines instruction on causal relationships between characteristics of the built environ ment and a variety of impacts with the use of computer-based models to give students first- hand experience with predicting impacts and testing alternative mitigation strategies.