About CEP
Community, Environment, and Planning (CEP) is an award-winning, interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts degree program offered through the College of Built Environments as one of the University's interdisciplinary undergraduate programs. CEP has gained distinction as a model for a highly personalized, active, and relevant educational experience within a large research institution. Housed in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, CEP students liberally draw upon the entire range of courses, faculty, and programs at the UW.
The problems we face in this world are simply too great to be met without active engagement from all perspectives and knowledge. To this end, a CEP education is founded on the following:
- Start where you are; articulate and embrace a vision of how you intend to make a difference in the world.
- With guidance from faculty, staff and peers construct a plan using CEP seminars, cross-disciplinary courses, and field experiences.
- Move deliberately with it in the final two years of undergraduate education.
- Through first-hand experience and in the context of the CEP community of learners, become acquainted with effective ways for working constructively together to anticipate and address critical issues facing the complex communities and world we inhabit.
A CEP education is fully lived, not passively taken. CEP students actively make their education in community with others. Students learn from learning groups of seventeen. Each group comprises a community of mutual learning that requires commitment, personal investment, and strong teamwork strategies for two years. Through six interconnected, quarterly seminars students engage the core content of the major: community, environment, and planning. These contemporary academic fields and areas of research include the study of community as subject and practice, exploration of the ecological context of all societal life, and an investigation of the potentials of planning for developing strategies for positive change.