PLAN 3030

This class was a fairly easy A. You're graded on participation, a midterm, three short papers, and a final paper. Readings consist of two short books and a handful of other articles.

Professor Moomaw is friendly and passionate about the subject, but her lectures were not easy to follow and she has a tendency to cold call people constantly. Lots of small group discussions in class, too. She was also pretty unorganized, which led to confusion about assignment prompts and due dates. Be prepared for that.

Interesting course although Professor Moomaws lectures are a bit all over the place and hard to follow. Kind of heavy on the reading each week and for the most part you have to do it. Exams are intimidating but not hard to get a good grade on as long as you have notes on the readings to study. Papers are also graded fairly.

I don't get why this class has a great reputation. Not to hate on urban planning, but it's all extremely abstract and never grounded in much. This class looked at case study after case study of failures in urban planning and rarely looked at any successes. I suspect this is because urban planning is a pretty new field compared to others, and so people are still figuring it out. The class is extremely vague, I didn't learn anything, and it's not that interesting. Do all the readings. Sometimes Professor Moomaw will randomly call on someone to summarize the articles, and you have to use ideas from the readings in your midterms which are take-home essays. Mixed feelings about this class. It's pretty easy, but you won't learn much and have to do a lot of readings

Solid class. Professor Moomaw is one of the friendliest and most helpful professors at UVA, and her office hours are a great way to have questions answered. A few papers (including a final case study) and a few take home exams. There's a fair amount of reading, and doing them and showing you did them is the biggest key to success in the class. As a planning student, I really liked the class. That being said, there were a ton of non-planning students in the class in the semester I took it, and they seemed to have a lower opinion of it. I still think it's worthwhile, but if you've never taken a planning class before it's something to keep in mind.