PhD in City & Regional Planning
As a doctoral student in UC Berkeley’s Department of City & Regional Planning, you’ll earn your degree from a top-ranked program and work with globally recognized faculty who bring diverse expertise and perspectives. Plus, you’ll have all the advantages, resources, and research opportunities of being at the world’s number one public university. Our alums are nationally and internationally recognized as planning educators, social science researchers and theorists, policy makers, and practitioners. Established in 1968, the Department of City & Regional Planning offers a rich, vibrant intellectual community for doctoral studies.
About the Program
At UC Berkeley, we understand cities as sites of potential revolutionary change, where new forms of social, political, and economic organization can emerge. The PhD in City & Regional planning focuses on the intersections of environmental sustainability, social inequality, and governance. Our approach to teaching and research connects theory to action, emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary and mixed-methods scholarship, and focuses on multiple scales, from the local to the global.
Our goal is to advance research and policy in four critical areas that cut across all areas of specialization in our curriculum and research:
- Inequalities and disparities across cities and neighborhoods, particularly with respect to income and wealth, race, gender, quality of education and urban services, access to employment opportunities, and exposure to pollutants.
- The role of cities in mitigating and adapting to climate change, including urban infrastructure, urban heat islands and their effects on vulnerable populations, urban resilience, and Black ecologies.
- The future of democracy in cities and the historic role of planning in shaping the uneven spatial distribution of violence, insecurity, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement within and across cities.
- Active engagement with technological changes, including Big Data and artificial intelligence, to ensure the democratization of data and analysis in ways that advance the social, environmental, and economic well-being of cities.
With have nearly 20 faculty with expertise in community and economic development, transportation, housing, urban design, international development, environmental planning, and global urbanism, the Department of City & Regional Planning offers a rich, vibrant intellectual community for doctoral studies.
About the Department of City & Regional Planning
The Department of City & Regional Planning, founded in 1948, joined with the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture to form the College of Environmental Design in 1959. Berkeley was the first university to bring together these disciplines into a single college, leading the way toward an integrated approach to analyzing, understanding, and designing our built environment. The college emphasizes environmental design as a profoundly ethical practice, inseparable from social, political, economic, and cultural contexts and co-produced through dynamic engagements with diverse communities.
FACULTY
At UC Berkeley, you’ll have the opportunity to study with world-class faculty who are experts in a range of disciplines, including city planning, public policy, anthropology, geography, physics, and architecture.
Berkeley Planning Journal
The Berkeley Planning Journal is a collaborative forum dedicated to advancing public-oriented and practice-engaged scholarship from the Department of City & Regional Planning. Published in print and online as an open-access journal, the Berkeley Planning Journal convenes scholars, activists and practitioners to examine contemporary problems in the built environment and define the challenges they pose to established planning theory and method. Situated in the San Francisco Bay Area, we see the Bay as a living laboratory whose challenges directly inform how we understand and engage with planning issues.
FINANCING YOUR EDUCATION
We are committed to recruiting students from all backgrounds with outstanding achievement and potential. All admitted PhD students receive five years of funding, which typically includes two years of fellowship funding with the remaining years covered by teaching assistant or research assistant positions. Students of the program have also been successful in securing additional funding for their research from both internal and external sources such as the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Foundation.The Department of City & Regional Planning and UC Berkeley offer multiple types of financial support to its graduate students.
Interested students are invited to reach out to faculty regarding their interests as potential advisors, but note that some faculty will prefer to review a complete application before scheduling a meeting. Note also that admission decisions are not made by individual faculty, but rather an admissions committee. Our PhD admissions process begins with three initial reviews of your application: the two faculty members you list as preferred advisors and one member of the PhD admission committee. The admission committee then meets to review all applications as a cohort and make admission/denial decisions. More information can be found on the department admissions page.
HOW TO APPLY
We recommend you start the application process as early as possible. As a prospective graduate student, you’ll submit your application through UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division. You’ll find lots of useful information on the Graduate Division website, including application instructions and information about funding your education.
- Review admissions requirements on the Graduate Division website
- Gather materials:
- Unofficial transcripts for each prior college or university attended
- Statement of Purpose. For tips on writing the Statement of Purpose, please see Writing the Statement of Purpose on the UC Berkeley Graduate Division website.
- Personal History Statement. For tips on writing a Personal History Statement, please see the Personal History Statement Guide on the UC Berkeley Graduate Division website.
- Contact information for three recommenders
- GRE scores and dates of test. GRE scores are reportable for 5 years following your test date.
- Resume/CV. This can include:
- Information about relevant coursework
- List of relevant publications or presentations
- List of honors/awards
- URL of website where your work is published, if applicable
- Evidence of English language proficiency, if applicable. For waivers, visit the Graduate Division website. Please note that Graduate Student Instructor positions have higher English language proficiency score requirements. We encourage you to review the Graduate Student Instructor website for detailed information on these requirements.Identify three faculty members whose work is aligned topically, methodologically, or both, with your interests; and explain why you are interested in working with each one. View faculty profiles.
- A recent publication, report, or writing sample. It is helpful to provide something that is closely related to your proposed study focus.
- Start your application on the Graduate Division website. You do not have to complete the entire application at one time: we recommend you start your application and review it as soon as possible.
- Scroll down and select PhD in City & Regional Planning.
- Follow the instructions in the application.
- Pay fee.
- Submit application. Allow yourself at least one hour prior to the deadline to submit your application. Late applications or changes to the application after the deadline will NOT be accepted.
- After submitting your application, you will receive an email from UC Berkeley’s Graduate Admissions Office confirming your submission.
- We strongly encourage you to log back into your application to monitor the status of materials received/processed, such as fee waivers, test scores, and recommendations.
- We send admissions decisions, along with notification of fellowship awards mid-February.
Only online applications (including letters of recommendation) are accepted. All documents, regardless of language of instruction, must be translated into the English language. Transcripts, diplomas, and certificates should be provided in the original language of instruction AND in English. Transcripts must show your full name, degree conferral date, and degree.
- Prerequisites
The principal admission requirements to the doctoral program in City & Regional Planning are overall excellence in past academic work and research, demonstrated creativity and intellectual leadership in professional activity, and the strong promise of sustained intellectual achievement, originality, and scholarship. The emphasis in the doctoral program is upon scholarship and research. At the same time, because the doctorate is offered in the context of a professional school, doctoral students are challenged to undertake applied research relevant to city and regional planning and policy problems. If you do not want to teach in planning or a related field, or to do advanced research, please reconsider applying to this program. Most doctoral students enter the program with a master’s degree in planning or a related field. The Master of City Planning is regarded as a terminal professional degree, and is not comparable to mid-study Master of Arts or Master of Science degrees offered in anticipation of the doctorate.
Admission to the doctoral program is very competitive. Only six to eight students are admitted each year, sometimes from a pool of as many as 80 applicants. For all applicants to the doctoral program (even those required to take an English-language competency exam (TOEFL, TOEFL CBT, iBT TOEFL, or IELTS) the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is required. Applicants must also secure at least three letters of recommendation that can explicitly evaluate their intellectual capability and past research and academic work.
Please note that admission decisions are not made by individual faculty, but rather an admissions committee. DCRP’s PhD admissions process begins with three initial reviews of your application: the two faculty members you list as preferred advisors and one member of the PhD admission committee. The admission committee then meets to review all applications as a cohort and make admission/denial decisions.
Designated Emphases
Many PhD students choose to pursue one or more of the designated emphases (DEs) offered through programs across campus. These DEs are unrelated to the outside field required by the City & Regional Planning PhD, and can be thought of instead as elective “minors” which provide opportunities for focused interdisciplinary work, mentorship, conference funding, research fellowships and an extra credential along with the doctoral degree. Common DEs pursued by DCRP PhD students include: