Regional Planning Studios

Every fall semester, second-year graduate students in the Master of Regional Planning Program (MRP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst participate in an intensive studio course. Under the guidance of a faculty member, students work on real-world planning projects with local and regional planning agencies. This experience reinforces the MRP curriculum and lets students apply their knowledge and skills within a community while serving a professional client. Communities and partner agencies also benefit from these student work projects at a substantially reduced cost. UMass Amherst has undertaken many such studio projects over the past decades. 

Projects

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Fall 2025: Windham Regional Flood Resilience for Dover, Whitingham, Wilmington and Readsboro, VT

This studio project is to be completed in Fall 2025.

Fall 2024: South Central Regional Council of Governments, Comprehensive Climate Action Plan, Authority to Implement and Municipal Emissions Reduction Plans for New Haven County, CT

This studio built on the Priority Climate Action Plan for New Haven County, CT
(PCAP) authored by the Fall 2023 cohort, and wrote the “Authority to Implement” section of the Comprehensive Climate Action Plan (CCAP), and designed a local greenhouse gas emissions reduction prioritization tool (Barchers, Cunningham, et al., n.d.; Barchers et al., 2024). We designed a project website and collaborated with communities from across New Haven County as well as the Connecticut Department of the Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP) to understand the challenges and opportunities in carbon emissions reduction strategies. We collaborated with the UMass NARSLab to quantify reductions and forecast emissions through 2050 (Zhao et al., n.d.). This work, collectively titled ImpaCT2050, represents an integration of practice and scholarship to advance regional planning for climate mitigation.

Fall 2023: South Central Regional Council of Governments, Priority Climate Action Plan for New Haven County, CT

Funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, the studio partnered with New Haven County, the South Central Regional Council of Governments, and the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments to author a Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP). The goal of the PCAP was to identify strategies to reduce carbon emissions across six sectors (mobility and transportation, electricity production and consumption, energy efficiency in buildings, waste management, industry, and working lands and forestry).

Fall 2021 and 2022: Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, Valley on Board

Funded through a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) Helping Obtain Prosperity for Everyone (HOPE) grant, the studio partnered with the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA) and the NARSLab in the Department of Civil Engineering (Dr. Jimi Oke), to use scenario planning to produce a set of plans for the PVTA’s fixed-route bus service that improved equity, accessibility, and efficiency (Barchers et al., 2021, 2022).

This project, named “Valley on Board,” designed alternatives to the fixed route service and drafted and implemented a regional public engagement plan. The project was focused primarily on improving system equity by partnering with environmental justice communities. We developed metrics for measuring equity and accessibility and provided recommendations to the PVTA. We also used this project to examine resilience concepts, methodologies, metrics, and modeling techniques in transportation modelling.

Fall 2020: Orange Economic Development Self Assessment

In partnership with the Town of Orange, and funded through a state grant, the studio cohort completed an Economic Development Self Assessment Exercise (EDSAE). An EDSAE is a process that a municipality undertakes to review the factors that are influencing the quality of life of its residents.  The report is guided by the EDSAE manual which outlines a repeatable process that is intended to be conducted regularly so that Orange can determine its economic development trajectory, to help inform its planning decisions. This inaugural report establishes a baseline to compare with future implementations, and it establishes the structure and processes to answer the questions for those future reports. 

Fall 2019: Boxborough Economic Development

The Town of Boxborough’s Economic Development Committee (EDC) contracted with the Center for Economic Development at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to produce an economic development study. Phase 1 of the study, conducted from September through December 2019 by Regional Planning Studio master’s students, began with an investigation of existing conditions and public opinion on economic development and concluded with four plausible future economic development scenarios designed to support the eventual creation of the Town’s long-term economic development plan. The students also conducted extensive community engagement to understand the values and priorities of residents. This studio was awarded the “Student Project Award” by the Massachusetts chapter of the American Planning Association.  

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Interested in Regional Planning Studios?

Please contact the studio instructor, Camille Barchers, cbarchers[at]umass.edu.