Welcome!
The School draws students from around the world. Through our professionally-accredited Master of Urban Planning degree program (with optional concentrations in Transportation Planning and Urban Development and Urban Design), we train professionals for the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors in two years of intensive study, much of which takes place in real-life group projects using the Montréal metropolitan region as a living laboratory. Our aim is to give individuals the intellectual and practical skills needed to excel in the field and thereby to improve human settlements around the world. The School also offers a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) program in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design, which was approved by the Québec Ministère de l'Éducation et de l'Enseignement supérieur in March 2020.
COVID-19 updates
For the latest information on McGill's response to COVID-19, please visit the Coronavirus Information website.
Winter 2020 Brenda and Samuel Gewurz Lecture in Urban Design
POSTPONED ... PLEASE STAY TUNED!
Our planned panel on SOCIAL-PURPOSE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT IN HOT MARKETS, featuring a panel of distinguished practitioners from San Francisco, Toronto, and Montréal, will not take place on the 31st of March owing to COVID-19 precautions. We hope to reschedule this event for sometime this Fall. Please watch for updates !
The School of Urban Planning is represented at COP25
Lisa Bornstein presented as part of the Capacity-Building Hub at COP25 in Madrid. Speaking about the IDRC-funded ADAPTO project, undertaken with Gonzalo Lizarralde (universite de Montreal) and other partners, she observed that: "We have been fundamentally challenged in our work on the ground by different ways of framing the [climate change] issue. We co-wrote our proposal with our Latin American and Caribbean partners around ‘resilience’ and climate change ‘adaptation.’ But that's not the story we are hearing from people on the ground. Those words have no resonance in their daily lives. What matters are questions of inclusion, social justice, livelihoods, and the challenges of everyday life. If we really want to deal with some of these larger climate change adaptation issues, they have to be tied into projects that seriously address the justice issues and the inclusion issues. That is something that has made us listen, re-frame and think about the discourse, and the narratives around adaptation and project planning measures." The full presentation, made together with Holmes Paez from the Universidad Javeriana in Botoga, Colombia is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds9uVpc22zk&feature=youtu.be.
New professor
The School is delighted to welcome Dr Anna Kramer as tenure-track Assistant Professor as of August 2019. Her research focuses on the practice of urban planning with attention to inequality of access to the city, particularly through economic coercion. Find out more by viewing her profile here.
Admissions for the academic year beginning in September 2021
The deadline to apply for admissions to our M.U.P. and Ph.D.* programs is the 15th of January 2021 for the academic year commencing in the Fall term (beginning September 2021).
The School handles all admissions to our programs through a deliberative committee-based process that begins in January and continues into the spring, as we make recommendations for admission in several rounds. Please carefully read the detailed information on the Admissions pages and the FAQ before sending a request for information. Whilst we do what is reasonable to respond to information requests, given the large number of inquiries, this is not always possible. Please do not contact individual faculty members with requests for special consideration for admission, as all files are reviewed by the Admissions Committee.
School newsletter
The School in the media
Media attention is being drawn to an important new report that was prepared by McGill's UPGo researchers (Prof. David Wachsmuth, Danielle Kerrigan, David Chaney, and Andrea Shillolo) on the increasing commercialization of short-term rentals (such as AirBnB) in Canada and what cities should do about it.
Student Supervised Research Project featured in the Montreal Gazette: St-Luc rail yards relocation could earn CP half-billion dollars: Libman
Charis Loong's first chapter from her Master's research project co-authored with Dea van Lierop and Ahmed El-Geneidy was recently featured in City Lab, Next City, and New York Magazine's Science of US section. Prof. El-Geneidy was interviewed by Global News and Metro News in Toronto regarding the same study.
Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy was interviewed by Jason Magder for the Montreal Gazette regarding the new Light Rail Project (REM) proposed by CDPQ for Montreal.