This course is appropriate to all students interested in understanding the built form of cities and interactions between built form and people at the scale of human experience. It does not attempt to teach design skills. Rather, the purpose of the course is to introduce students to a number of research areas broadly useful to planning/urban design practice and inquiry, and to further develop their skills for understanding and critiquing both research methods and findings. The course should help students define their own research interests and help them identify methods useful in answering their research questions. A conceptual framework will be used to help organize knowledge areas as well as facilitate understanding between different approaches. Environment-behaviour and typo-morphological approaches will be given special attention as they have the clearest links to practice, but students will also have opportunity to focus on other research approaches of their choice.