The Story of Urban Planning

By Ivis García and Jason Holt

Everything on this site, the zoning debates, the urban renewal programs, the highway revolts, the fair housing fights, has always been taught as a list of facts to memorize for the AICP exam. This book is the story hiding underneath that list. It follows urban planning from the tenements of the 1890s to the housing fights of today, told as one continuous argument instead of a set of index cards, because each answer became the question the next generation had to solve.

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Master urban planning concepts with 12+ hours of audio lectures and hundreds of practice questions — completely free.

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Everything You Need to Pass

Audio Lectures

12+ hours of content covering all AICP exam topics across 5 sections, 25 units, and 75 comprehensive lessons. Study on the go with our mobile-friendly player, adjustable playback speeds, and automatic progress tracking.

Practice Questions

Thousands of practice questions with detailed explanations. Take lesson quizzes, unit tests, section exams, and 3 full 170-question practice exams that mirror the real AICP test format and difficulty. There are over 1,800 practice questions in total!

How to use this site

AICP.city is a free study aid, built and maintained independently. It is not affiliated with or produced by the American Planning Association or the American Institute of Certified Planners.

We do not know the pass rate of people who study here.

The practice questions on this site were written using APA's AICP Examination Illustrative Questions as a model for format and style. APA notes that those sample questions are not on the exam and do not represent its full range of content or level of difficulty. The same caution applies to the questions here.

What we can recommend is time and sources. Budget 100 hours of study spread over several months, and build that plan around the materials APA recommends on its certification pages, including the exam content outline, the selected reading list, and the exam prep sessions your chapter runs. Use the lessons and practice questions here alongside those materials rather than in place of them.

APA Exam Prep Resources APA Selected Reading List Exam Content Outline AICP Illustrative Questions (PDF)

How It All Came Together

2024

A course from notes and exam materials

Ivis García started building a course for Texas A&M from her own notes studying for the 2014 AICP exam, along with APA Policy Guides, PAS (Planning Advisory Service) reports, and the AICP study guides most candidates use to prepare. She fed all of it to ChatGPT as context to help organize and draft lessons, then edited everything by hand, placing the course on Canvas for her students and rounding it out with resources gathered from colleagues that summer.

Spring 2025

Voiced, and shared for free

Jason Holt turned the course into audio using an AI generated voice from ElevenLabs, editing and producing it into a free podcast, Urban Planning Foundations, on Spotify. Ivis put the lessons online on a Google site so other exam-takers could use them too.

November 2025

Rebuilt into AICP.city

Jason later took all of the previous materials, added some new ones, and rebuilt the whole thing, narrative, audio, and practice questions, using Claude Code, with Ivis editing along the way. That became AICP.city.

Summer 2026

The story underneath it all

Somewhere in that process they noticed the facts weren't really a list: each one was a response to the one before it. That realization became The Story of Urban Planning.

Listen on Spotify Original Course Site

About the Authors

Ivis García, Ph.D., AICP

Associate Professor

Ivis García, Ph.D., AICP, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning at Texas A&M University, where she also coordinates the Master of Urban Planning program. Her research on housing, community development, and disaster resilience has appeared in more than sixty peer-reviewed publications.

Jason Holt

Full Stack Developer

Jason Holt is a full stack developer and the founder of Async Communications, where he builds document intelligence and agent-based software systems. He brought that same background to AICP.city, producing the course audio with an AI generated voice from ElevenLabs, then rebuilding the entire platform, lessons, audio, and practice questions, into the app available today.

With thanks to our reviewers

Thanks to Nichola Lowe and her students, Maddey Gintner, Lee Eubanks, and Zachary A. Gatton, at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, who reviewed AICP.city's lessons and practice questions in spring of 2026 and sent back the kind of detailed feedback that actually makes a platform better.

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