Speaker
Description
Despite the complex and interdependent nature of contemporary and future urban challenges, which certainly require a comprehensive and integrated approach, planning education needs to provide students with specific analytical and operational competences. Furthermore, the role of planners has evolved significantly in the past decades: no longer envisioned as all-powerful visionaries, they are now expected to navigate specialized professional environments, while adapting to increasingly complex, multidisciplinary settings (Mazza, 2013).
Nevertheless, despite the persistent limitations to specialization in many educational settings, it has, in certain cases, led to detrimental forms of hyper-specialization, leading to excessive fragmentation of knowledge bases, professional training, and policy approaches (Signoroni, 2024). Such educational framework undermines a planners’ capability of understanding interdependent urban processes, increases the theory-practice gap and impinges on the risk of further isolating academia and expert knowledge (Palermo, 2014; Signoroni, 2022). Additionally, it exacerbates the current difficulties in collaboration between different actors, leading to a form of multidisciplinarity where individuals work in parallel, even within heterogeneous teams, without achieving true integration of knowledge and skills.
Such pernicious mechanisms of sectorization and compartmentalization are the result of failing educational practices, which require a paradigm shift. Hybridization between different fields such as, for instance, traditional planning and ecology, could lead to more effective and efficient ways of understanding and tackling urban issues by integrating new approaches with traditional ones, and replacing obsolete practices in education and beyond.
Here, a form of “specialized generalist” is proposed: someone able to specialize in a specific subfield (e.g. ecological planning), which results from hybridization between disciplines, but simultaneously manages to comprehend the multifaced nature of the urban, and how choices taken in specific fields may relate to each other. Such an approach would mitigate the risks associated with both excessively broad and overly specific curricula, which may lead to low job attractiveness on the one hand, and limited career choice and resilience in the job market on the other. Both extremes have led and lead to inadequacy in fulfilling the tasks that planners are supposed to accomplish.
Hybridization and transdisciplinarity in urban planning curricula should focus primarily on two main issues: mastery of the specific tools of planning and a reduction of the theory-practice gap.
The specialized generalist applies their knowledge to specific topics within planning practice (Bonfantini, 2024) by mastering the tools that define our disciplinary field: projects, plans (particularly urban codes), and policies. Tools that remain at the core of planning even in the most radical, transformative proposals (Moroni, 2010). Hybridization would allow for a critical understanding of such tools, their scope and their conventional application, strengthening the planner’s role in what seems to have become a highly contested field of knowledge and practice, resulting in the partial marginality of such figure (Bonfantini, 2023).
To enable a goal-oriented approach and governance of the tools, educators should substantially reduce the current gap between theoretical and practical training. Courses aimed at developing practical, project-oriented knowledge (e.g. urban design studios) should be supplemented with a greater theoretical background (e.g. composition). Likewise, theoretical coursework focusing on understanding current planning phenomena from an analytical perspective (e.g. urban policy/codes analysis) should encourage students to develop proposals (e.g. policy design), not by oversimplifying the complexity of such tasks, but by exposing them to real-world challenges.
The study draws upon existing literature and is informed by a targeted and qualitative comparative analysis of case studies from multiple planning schools across Europe. The paradigm shift underpinning this study would be reflected in more integrated curricula, combining theoretical and practical knowledge, while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among transdisciplinary-educated, specialized generalists.
References
Bonfantini, Bertrando G. (2023) ‘Urbanistica contesa’, Urbanistica Informazioni, 307. [Online] available at: https://doi.org/10.62661/ui307-2023-106.
Bonfantini, Bertrando G. (2024) ‘Urbanistica: contro il misconoscimento di un sapere pratico necessario’, Urbanistica Informazioni, 315. [Online] available at: https://doi.org/10.62661/ui315-2024-013.
Mazza, Luigi (2013) ‘If Strategic “Planning Is Everything, Maybe It’s Nothing”: Comments on Albrechts and Balduccis article: “Practicing Strategic Planning”’, disP - The Planning Review, 49 (3), pp. 40–42. [Online] available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02513625.2013.859006.
Moroni, Stefano (2010) ‘Rethinking the theory and practice of land-use regulation: Towards nomocracy’, Planning Theory, 9 (2), pp. 137–155. [Online] available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095209357868.
Palermo, Pier Carlo (2014) ‘What ever is happening to urban planning and urban design? Musings on the current gap between theory and practice’, City, Territory and Architecture, 1 (1), p. 7. [Online] available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/2195-2701-1-7.
Signoroni, Ruggero (2022) ‘Rethinking the role of the “fragile experts” in the age of technique. Urban planners between specialization and ontological uncertainty’, Planum Magazine, 1 (44). [Online] available at: http://www.planum.net/planum-magazine/themes-online/strong-rethinking-the-role-of-the-fragile-experts-in-the-age-of-technique-strong-br-urban-planners-between-specialization-and-ontological-uncertainty-br
Signoroni, Ruggero (2024) ‘What If Planning Is Not A Science? A Call For Consideration Of “Epistemic Plurality” In Planning Theories’, in AESOP 2024 Book of Abstracts. AESOP 2024 Annual Congress, Paris, p. 688. [Online] available at: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/2135
| Keywords | Specialization; knowledge-integration; planning tools; planning education; theory-practice gap |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
