Video Textbook Brings City Planning Education to YouTube
by Kai Parel-Sewell
snippet of episode one: "Introduction to Land Use — City Beautiful Basics"
Cities are fundamental to our day-to-day experiences, whether it's the location of our homes or the means of commuting to work. Despite this, the design and development of cities, as well as how they operate, may not always be clear. To help people better understand cities, Cal Poly City and Regional Planning (CRP) Professor Dave Amos created a YouTube channel, City Beautiful, almost seven years ago.
The channel has become widely popular, amassing nearly 90 million views. Featured are unique topics, such as video games, history and pop culture, to help introduce the audience to the fundamentals of planning. Exploring how these everyday topics relate to urban planning helps make complex issues more relatable and digestible.
Amos hopes to further develop this concept with the creation of a new video textbook, supported by a recent Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities (RSCA) grant from Cal Poly’s division of Research, Economic Development, and Graduate Education (R-EDGE).
“The point of the series is to have it be as freely and as broadly available as possible, which is why it's on my YouTube channel,” said Amos.
Titled "City Beautiful Planning Basics,” the series will span five videos, each one roughly 10-20 minutes long, covering land use, transportation, environment, housing and social justice.
“When I think about cities as somebody who’s been around this game for a while, land use and transportation are just super fundamental,” said Amos about the first two videos. “They’re like two sides of the same coin. I think that transportation is a form of land use, and land use completely relies on transportation.”
The other three videos in the series — environment, housing and social justice — will offer critical insights into the ongoing issues planners face.
“We're in a climate emergency,” Amos explained, “I [had to] have a video that addresses climate change.” Intertwined with the housing crisis, he noted the issue “is not just California anymore, it’s across the country.”
The final video, focusing on social justice, will discuss “the history of redlining, white flight, and what happened to cities to make them so segregated, unfair and unjust.”
Ultimately, the video format offers flexibility and immediacy that traditional textbooks do not. “People actually watch videos,” Amos said. “You can write a textbook, and [some] people might read it, but most people won't. It's about magnifying impact and reaching people where they are already.”
Perhaps the greatest benefit of the RSCA grant is the opportunity to engage in teacher-scholar research. For this project, Amos wrote the planning scripts with MCRP student Sully Israel. Working together, they assembled a wide variety of introductory city planning books and syllabi from across the country to accurately select “CRP basics.”
Catch the video textbook on City Beautiful this spring, and don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe!
