AESOP ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Revisiting the art of town planning: what can archives teach us about the pedagogy of design?

10 Jul 2025, 11:00

10m

29

Oral SS 11 | The value and role of design in planning education SS_11 THE VALUE AND ROLE OF DESIGN IN PLANNING EDUCATION

Speaker

Dr Alison McCandlish (University of Glasgow)

Description

The historical archives of the Royal Town Planning Institute recently digitised by the Hathi Trust cover the period from establishing the Institute through to the 1990’s, and offer a rich record of activities undertaken within planning practice from 1914-1993. In this paper I discuss my findings based on a purposive qualitative review of these archives relating to planning education, focusing on how design is treated as a discipline and the pedagogical approaches which drive this.

Throughout the archives there are fascinating opinion pieces, records of conference discussions and advertisements for courses and training. Design is seen as a key component of the “ethical principles governing our perception of the art and science of town planning” (Mawson, 1915, p. 83), and a storyline of the interaction of planning practice, planning education and the related professions against the backdrop of evolving legislation and public opinion is played out in these extensive volumes.

In the paper will also reflect on the problems and benefits in using institutional archives for pedagogical research, where a bit of serendipity and an archigraphic eye (Tamboukou, 2015; Stanley, 2016) definitely come in handy when casting a critical on archival “uncomfortable truths” (Royal Town Planning Institute, 2024).

Finally, I contextualise these insights by looking at how these are relevant in planning and design education today.

References

Mawson, T. (1915) ‘Some of the Larger Problems of Town Planning’, Papers and discussions of The Town Planning Institute 1914-1915, 1(1), pp. 79–84. Available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015038635986?urlappend=%3Bseq=5 (Accessed: 10 January 2025).

Royal Town Planning Institute (2024) Historical archives. Available at: https://www.rtpi.org.uk/about-the-rtpi/history/historical-archives/ (Accessed: 20 September 2024).

Stanley, L. (2016) ‘Archival methodology inside the black box- Noise in the archive!’, in N. Moore et al. (eds) The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences. 1st edn. Routledge, pp. 33–67. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315612577-3.

Tamboukou, M. (2015) ‘Feeling narrative in the archive: the question of serendipity’, Qualitative Research, 16(2), pp. 151–166. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794115569563.