Speaker
Description
Since its beginnings more than a century ago, the discipline of planning has developed into an academic field relevant in research, teaching and practice. For a long time, however, planning was merely understood as a practical problem-oriented part of engineering work. It was "trapped inside a modernist instrumental rationalism" (Healey 1997: 7). In the 1960s controversial debates began about the relationship between planning and politics, about the understanding of values in planning and about the legitimacy of planning statements. Since then, planning has – at least partly – shifted from planning as a design-based art to planning as a (social) science (Davoudi, Pendlebury 2010).
This paper examines how spatial planning is taught and researched today at planning schools around the world. The empirical basis is formed by selected major planning schools on all continents and their study programs. According to UN Habitat (2009), the only report that attempts to provide an inventory of planning education at the university level worldwide, there were back then 550 universities in 81 countries that offered planning degrees. Today, there are likely to be many more. Any empirical work must therefore be selective.
In the research project presented here, a list of 20 major planning schools in Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia was therefore compiled in consultation with the continental associations of planning schools – AAPS, ACSP, AESOP, ALEUP, ANZAPS and APSA – and on the basis of a desk research. Between October 2023 and May 2024, ten planning schools on all six continents were visited to conduct semi-structured interviews with faculty members as well as students and to observe classes. At the beginning of 2025, an additional online survey was conducted at a total of twenty planning schools worldwide.
The paper presents a comparative overview of the results of the empirical research. Despite the sometimes dramatically different issues that spatial planning has to deal with in different parts of the world, the research indicates that planning education is remarkably similar and that the conceptual and theoretical understanding of spatial planning is surprisingly homogenous – despite the lack of a global canon of standard textbooks. The homogenizing influence of standards such as the AESOP core curriculum (Frank, Koll-Schretzenmayr 2024) and the PAB accreditation standards is evident, as is the Anglo-American hegemony in literature (Stiftel, Mukhopadhyay 2007) and the significant increase in international cooperation and networking in the field (Haghani 2023).
The presented research ultimately produced a map of planning as a discipline that provides an overview of what is understood by planning in different parts of the world and how the travelling concept of planning changes as it travels. It includes various aspects of applied planning (comprehensive planning, sectoral planning, instruments) and of the foundations of planning (basic disciplines, theories, methods).
References
Davoudi, Simin; Pendlebury, John (2010): The evolution of planning as an academic discipline. The Town Planning Review, Vol. 81, No. 6, pp. 613-645.
Frank, Andrea; Koll-Schretzenmayr, Martina (2024): Revising the AESOP Core Curriculum – for the 21st century, disP - The Planning Review, 60:1, pp. 63-67.
Haghani, Milad et al. (2023): The landscape and evolution of urban planning science. Cities, Vol. 136, 104261.
Healey, Patsy (1997): Collaborative Planning. Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. London: Palgrave.
Stiftel, Bruce; Mukhopadhyay, Chandrima (2007): Thoughts on Anglo-American hegemony in planning scholarship: Do we read each other's work? The Town Planning Review, Vol. 78, No. 5, pp. 545-572.
UN-HABITAT (2009): Global Report on Human Settlements 2009: Planning Sustainable Cities, United Nations Human Settlements Program, London: Earthscan.
| Keywords | Planning education, planning curricula, planning schools, travelling concept |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
