Welcome to the City Planning and Landscape Architecture Collection located located in the Funk Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences Library (Funk ACES Library) at 200 ACES Library, Information and Alumni Center, MC-633, 1101 South Goodwin Avenue, Urbana 61801, (217) 333-2416.
The collection serves the departments of Urban & Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture, as well as the students and faculty in various disciplines and related campus libraries, such as economics (Business Information Services), geography and Geographic Information Systems (Map Library, Geology Virtual Library, GIS Specialist in Scholarly Commons), civil engineering (Grainger Engineering Library Information Center), political science (Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library), sociology (Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library), natural history (Prairie Research Institute Librarian), architecture (Architecture and Art Library), leisure studies (Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library), health studies (Biology Virtual Library, Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library), and environmental studies (all libraries!).
Considered one of the most interdisciplinary collections in the Library, the unit collects in the areas of land-use policy, environmental planning and law, waste management, low-cost community housing and community services, demographics, historic preservation, landscape design, ecology, third-world planning issues, local government, tourism, and many other facets of city planning and landscape architecture.
The collection is particularly well-known for its historical holdings. The landscape architecture component of the collection began with the founding of the University of Illinois in 1867; the city planning component began in 1913, when the country’s first professor of city planning, Charles M. Robinson, joined the faculty. A small City Planning and Landscape Architecture Library was located in Mumford Hall from 1924 until 2008, when the collection and services were merged with the Funk ACES Library.
Collection Summary
- The collection contains comprehensive city plans, professional reports, and unconventional materials dating back to the early 1900s from the United States and Europe. More modern items include information from Africa, Asia, and Australia as well.
- The reference collection contains core sources such as atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias, bibliographies, periodical indexes and abstracts, statistical sources, legal sources, biographical sources, handbooks and aids to professional practice, and directories.
- The landscape architecture component includes an unusually strong collection of pre-1900 landscape books, pamphlets, and periodicals.
- The unit maintains an extensive vertical file containing planning reports and documents from city, county, state, and regional agencies as well as nursery catalogs.
- A current collection of dissertations and masters’ theses completed by students in the departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture is maintained by the unit.
- Patrons have access to electronic resources, including full Internet access and specialized products on CD-ROM.