Alabama Planning Institute   

This recertification course will help those citizens who serve as members of local planning commissions or elected officials to better understand the legal requirements and process of reviewing and updating the comprehensive plan. This course will also give local officials, staff, engineers, and other consultants a better understanding of the role the comprehensive plan plays in growth and development in their community. 

When you register for the Home Study program you will receive a copy of The Citizen’s Guide to Planning (Fourth Edition). This book contains eight chapters which have been grouped into five assignments, as follows:

Assignment 1
Chapter 1: Why Plan?
Chapter 2: Navigating the Planning Landscape
Assignment 2
Chapter 3: The Comprehensive Plan
Chapter 4: What Are We Trying to Achieve?
Assignment 3
Chapter 5: Putting the Plan to Work – Implementation
Assignment 4
Chapter 6: The Plan in Action – The Application Review Process
Assignment 5
Chapter 7: The Law of Planning
Chapter 8: Behaving Yourself – The Ethics of Planning
Each of these assignments features a numbered list of quotations from the text book. For the purpose of this program, quotations are taken from Chapters 1 through 8; there are no quotations taken from the “Introduction,” or the conclusion “Being a Leader.” The quotations are listed sequentially, just as they appear in the book. Occasionally you will find two quotations from the same page. Chapters 1 through 8 of the book cover 206 pages of text. There are 134 pages from which one quotation has been selected, eleven pages with two quotations, for a total of 145 quotations. There are 61 pages from which no quotation was selected.

Since 1993 when the Third Edition was published, urban planning has been subjected and responded to many changes, especially to the more difficult and critical approaches to implementation of plans. The 2009 Fourth Edition addresses these changes and covers a much wider range of topics and more complicated techniques of analyses than those discussed in the Third Edition. The current version of the book still deals with basic procedures and issues, but it also addresses the new techniques and procedures which are now a part of contemporary planning. The quotations listed in the five assignments of the course have been selected in an effort to emphasize the new material presented in the course book.