The City Planning and Landscape Architecture Library serves the departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture, as well as the students and faculty in various disciplines of economics (Business and
Economics Library), geography (Map and Geography Library), civil engineering (Grainger Engineering Library Information Center), political science (Education and Social Science Library), sociology (Education and Social Science Library), natural history (Natural History Survey Library), architecture (Architecture and Art Library), leisure studies (Applied Health Sciences Library) and environmental studies (Funk Agriculture Library). 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. Today, the collection contains more than 150,000 volumes, more than 20,000 of which can be found in the City Planning and Landscape Architecture Library and more than 100,000 of which can be found in the main bookstacks or Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The unit adds 800-900 new monographs annually. Approximately 200 current periodical titles are also in the collection. Non-print materials, such as slide sets and videocassettes, can be found in the Undergraduate Library Media Center.
