My name is Dr Mike Beazley, and I'm the Co-Director of the MSc Urban and Regional Planning which
is accredited by the Royal Town Planning Institute.
My name is Dr Austin Barber.
I'm also Co-Director of the MSc Urban and Regional Planning programme and Admissions
Director for the programme as well.
The programme is the MSc in Urban Regional Planning.
What makes it special is it really builds on our sort of background in planning education,
but it also offers the potential for a professional accreditation for people to then pursue a
career in planning.
The programme entails the delivery of a 180 credits of either of full-time or part-time
basis.
The full-time offer is over 12 months.
We sort of begin at the end of September and it runs right the way through to the end of
the following September.
The part-time option runs over two years.
The students will do a combination of taught modules – 120 credits of taught modules
plus a 60 credit dissertation module which brings the total up to 180 credits.
They also have to do an optional module as part of their taught credits and they must
relate that optional module to their dissertation to get a sort of specialist stream that runs
through the whole of the programme.
In terms of assessment we have no exams, it’s all assessed through essays, project work,
reports, presentations, a whole series of things that we hope to build both their academic
but also their professional skills in terms of becoming, you know, a professional planner
that can work out in the world of practice.
I guess one other thing is also a lot of project work as well.
Indeed so.
With practitioners in and around the city working on real-life kinds of assessments
and a lot of presentations and again, very, very real-life sort of project work attached
to those kind of opportunities.
Yes, the programme is well embedded into the world of practice, and so everything the students
work on is not sort of artificially created – these are all real-life projects or issues
that the practitioners themselves are dealing with.
Well I think we provide a good quality course in terms of the content of the programme.
Birmingham is a great location in which to study planning.
It’s a sort of great planning laboratory.
We can sort of make good use of that in our teaching.
Birmingham is the second city in the UK, so provides a lot of opportunities for us to
sort of exploit in terms of, you know, learning experiences for students in terms of real-life
issues.
And of course Birmingham itself is a good University.
It’s in the Russell Group; it has a good reputation; it’s constantly reinvesting
in the facilities that it has for students, and so we feel a combination of both the programme
and the location is really, you know, a good one.
The MSc Urban and Regional Planning programme is aimed at people who are interested in getting
involved in a future career and profession in planning and related aspects of the built
environment as well such as urban design, property, community development, urban regeneration,
and housing schemes – areas like that.
The entry requirements are generally speaking a 2:1 undergraduate degree in a related field,
so that can be to do with the built environment, geography, other aspects of social sciences
– anything that’s relevant to the shape and future of our cities.
We do encourage people to get experience beforehand but it’s not essential, but certainly the
main thing is an enthusiasm and a real appetite for planning for shaping sustainable futures
for our cities.
The main aims of the MSc Urban and Regional Planning are to equip students to become reflective
and very professional practitioners in planning and related aspects of the built environment
sort of professions.
Most importantly we do want students to have the skills to go into the professional workplace,
but also the aptitudes and the ability to work with different kinds of stakeholders,
different kinds of communities, and really to take a very ethical and I think responsible
view towards the future of cities and the planning of our built environment.
In terms of where students can go after this, we do find students got into certainly planning
in the public and private sectors, so with consultancies but also local authorities and
government agencies, but also with property consultancies, urban design firms, architects,
and also other fields such as utilities and major companies such as, again, retailers,
any firms that need property planning requirements again are very important employers for our
graduates.
My favourite thing about teaching on the MSc Urban and Regional Planning course is when
we get our students to work with practitioners and work with communities around the city
of Birmingham, working on real-life projects, major developments, major regeneration initiatives,
and coming up with their own sort of ideas and their own sort of responses to the challenges
in the modern cities such as Birmingham.
It’s especially gratifying when we see students work with practitioners and different community
groups and actually start to present their ideas and to work with those sort of stakeholders
in terms of coming up with very exciting sort of planning and design options within cities.
We really see the students mature in doing that, really get the confidence, you know,
to go out into the professional world and again, the feedback they get is also tremendously
awarding as well.
Well my favourite thing about teaching on the course really reflects what Austin has
just been talking about really.
It’s the sort of the interaction with the students that we’re lucky enough to have
them for a 12 month period, so we really get to see them sort of develop and blossom through
that period, you know, in working on the various sort of modules that they do.
I think the other very rewarding thing that we both find is that we have our own undergraduates
coming through onto the Masters programme.
It’s very sort of rewarding to see them make that progression.
I think the other thing that’s very rewarding too is the fact that most of them do actually
secure jobs at the end of the course which is again a very rewarding thing for us because,
you know, we feel we've actually made a positive contribution really to their futures.
So I think that’s really, you know, one of the key things I think about why we do
thoroughly enjoy teaching this programme.