The Department of City and Regional Planning
Founded in 1946, DCRP is one of the largest, oldest, and best-known programs of graduate planning education and research in North America.
We are located in the heart of the country's oldest state university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, founded in 1793. The state of North Carolina, the Research Triangle region, and the community of Chapel Hill are ideally suited to serve as the home of a nationally ranked program in city and regional planning.
We are among the first ten planning education programs in the United States. The original bases of the Department and its program were ideas about regionalism (hence the degree, Master of City and Regional Planning), broadly conceived development planning, and the application of social science methods to practical problems of government that were being explored on the Chapel Hill campus in the 1940's.
This was the first planning department to be established with its principal university base in the social sciences rather than in architecture or landscape design and to demonstrate the interdisciplinary union of social science, design and engineering. We have retained and strengthened that social science legacy through the multidisciplinary research and teaching of our faculty.
The Department of City and Regional Planning welcomes students, faculty, staff, and all visitors regardless of race, religion, gender identification, sexual orientation, age, or disability status. The more reflective of society’s diversity the department is, the better we are.