This degree?is premised on the following ideas:

• ?Community? is not a singular concept; moreover, less visible and under-resourced urban publics are often in need of specific forms of investment and support in order to engage the political process;
• "Planning? is about enacting urban socio-spatial futures, through a variety of different professional roles; as such it happens in a number of different organizational settings and job titles;
• The ways that people act and the social structures within which they are able to act are?co-constituted; one creates and re-creates the other, and effective change agents use existing structures to generate new forms of action, and/or take singular, strategic actions to enable, demand, or elicit structural change.

Graduates will be prepared to be competent collaborative professionals who work with and empower community constituents, influencing processes of policy formation, resource generation, community change, and urban development. ?The program's emphasis on urban social issues, community development, and urban problem solving, and its commitment to training students to think critically and creatively, to work collaboratively in the interest of creating sustainable communities and to effectively communicate knowledge in a variety of ways is a direct expression of the UW Tacoma mission as an higher education institution.??