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Professor Andreas Faludi
Why can't the future of Planning education be more like the past?
Why should one want the future of
planning education to be more like the past? True, it has had its days
of glory with its paradigm of combining action-orientation with the
capacity for reflection encouraged by a dose of social-science input.
However, tertiary education is becoming a challenge for this paradigm.
Planning practice, too, raises new issues and takes new avenues. At the
same time, planning academics world-wide have organised themselves and
are addressing global issues. In Europe in particular planning is
responding to the coming of the European Union (EU). The paper reflects
on what it means for the future of planning education.
Different planning traditions have caused misunderstandings and
conflicts. However, the emergent consensus is that the EU should pursue
'territorial cohesion' as a complement to economic and social cohesion:
spatial strategies rendering various policies as they relate to
territory more coherent, with land-use regulation remaining a matter for
the separate states. This may seem an EU problem, but in fact regional
integration is a common challenge, raising three questions: what does
integration mean for (a) nation-states; (b) territoriality; (c) spatial
planning. Rather than being about controlling territory, planning
becomes the engineering of connectivity. Facing this challenge, planning
has strengths to bring to bear: spatial analysis and imagination,
pointing out linkages crisscrossing jurisdictions, just as citizens
crisscross them. In fact, the view of the world consisting of nested,
mutually exclusive containers in which conventional planning is caught
is inadequate, and it is time for planning to adapt its tools and
approaches. At the same time, the existing educational paradigm,
enriching action-orientation with academic reflection, should be robust
enough to adapt. After all, planning education has responded to
challenges in the past. So maybe, yes, in this sense we want its future
to be more like the past.
Professor Bruce Stiftel
Planning the paths of Planning schools
The history of planning education recalls
the phrase, “Physician, heal thyself!” Planning schools have seized
opportunity from social movements, policy fashion, and academic vogue to
build a global system of planning education that could not have been
imagined when the first planning schools were created in Liverpool,
Karlsruhe, Boston and Adelaide. Certainly this system has been to the
betterment of urban development and human welfare. Certainly the system
has never been larger, today comprising perhaps 600 planning schools and
13,000 academics. At the same time, the system has evolved with little
planning, and now it is threatened by pressures for budget cutbacks in
universities, national research quality measurement schemes, and a
pervasive tension between planning academics and practitioners.
This paper seeks to understand the pressures urban planning schools face
in the early 21st Century through exploration of the factors leading to
planning school evolution in the 20th. The unplanned paths of planning
schools will be set against the phenomenal growth in planning education.
Today’s planning school debates between design and policy, practice and
scholarship, context-specificity and one-world embrace, modernity and
post-modernity, will be used as a platform to examine the choices
planning education faces today. To advance in the 21st Century, planning
schools will have to get much better at systematic assessment of
knowledge; this will demand much more effective methods for exchange of
scholarship across national boundaries. How we manage relevance to our
national planning professional contexts while building capacity for
global learning will define the planning school of the future. To
succeed in balancing these competing objectives, planning schools must
get more serious about planning themselves: we will have to apply our
own practice skills at forecasting, collaborating and design to the
choices we face about our own futures.
Professor Dory Reeves
Future Scoping - developing excellence in urban planners
Whilst appreciating, celebrating and
learning from the past it is important to focus on the future. It is an
important time for planning, for planning education and professional
development in Australasia as it is globally. Now more than ever we need
to consider how best to instil and develop excellence in urban planners.
As the role planning can and should play in sustainable urban
development gains recognition internationally, planners need to have
competence in offering guidance on how best to create places for the
future whether cities, towns or rural communities. As with all other
professionals, planners must demonstrate their ability to transform
understanding into practical and achievable outcomes. This must be the
key to planning education and training.
This paper identifies some of the challenges facing planning; it
considers what excellence means and the implications for education and
lifelong learning. It highlights the need to develop the skill in
recognising and acknowledging differences that can affect the decisions
we make. Cultural competence, an aspect that has been under-emphasised
up till now, will influence the future of our cities.
Trevor Budge
Educating Planners, Educating for Planning or Planning Education: The
Neverending Story
Planning education courses in Australia
celebrate a long and proud tradition. However the current state of play
some sixty years after they commenced presents a rather confusing
position and a series of conundrums. The employment demand for planners
has never been stronger (with the rider that as I write this synopsis
the global financial meltdown may well turn that around rather sharply).
The diversity of programs and courses on offer at undergraduate and
postgraduate level across Australia is at a peak with more in the wings.
Yet in many respects there is increasing confusion around what the term
‘planner’ actually means and what the profession itself is referring to
when it uses the term. With some ‘planners’ spending their working life
processing applications for approvals, others making a living as ‘expert
witnesses’, or as perpetual advocates for whatever a favoured client can
get a bank manger to support, there are serious concerns as to whether
some of our graduates will ever actually plan anything.
At the same time the term ‘planner’ now embraces social planners,
transport planners, infrastructure planners, urban designers with a
planning background, environmental planners and so the list goes on. The
antiquated but still used term ‘town planner’ seems even more irrelevant
some would even say almost irreverent. Planners are in demand to take on
roles and positions outside of ‘planning’. In one sense their specific
training in planning seemed to provide them with little of direct
relevance to these roles. But looking at it another way the building of
their capacity at university to think, to critically analyse, to
communicate with diverse professions and communities and to act
strategically are the very essence of any successful professional in the
twenty first century. Yet despite these highly useful and marketable
attributes the planner and planning, as traditionally viewed at least
appears to have less respect and traction in terms of public policy than
it has for years. The idea that there is such a thing as a
professionally trained and educated person who is skilled in designing
and managing land use change for the betterment of society has little
resonance with many in public policy and land development.
Despite the proliferation of courses the debate over what should be
taught, what is the role of planning education and even the perennial
question what does a planner do is in many respects as strong as ever.
Into this situation comes two initiatives by the Planning Institute of
Australia that confront planning education; the 2004 National Inquiry
into Planning Education and Employment and in 2008 Foundations for the
Future – The Planning Education Discussion Paper. Both of which discuss
fairly familiar agendas and offer suggestions as to the way forward.
They recount the diversity of planning and the increasing difficulty in
planning education seeking to cope with a complex world and competing
demands. But both, perhaps understandably, fall short of expounding the
clear direction that some seek but others resist.
We appear to be faced by three distinct choices in terms of planning and
education. Firstly, to continue on largely as present – that is to
recognize the difficulties and issues but largely do what we have been
doing for some time. It’s an interesting mixture of tradition and
adaptation. It is about building on past practice and in a rather ad hoc
way build onto it. Courses are renewed but rarely rewritten, some new
courses come along that seek a vibrant contemporary theme or look like
what has gone before repackaged and rebranded. Despite my apparent
criticism it is a process that has in some respects served us quite
well. It’s what I term a mix of planning education and educating
planners.
Secondly, we can make a much clearer distinction in who we teach and
recognise that many who work in planning need to be taught a set of
skills in order to be practitioners in a regulatory system in an
increasingly adversarial world, while others will exercise more creative
skills and will build and rebuild our cities and landscapes because they
have vision. Some will transcend and move between these two roles but
many will not. It’s what I term a much clearer and distinct mix of
education and training. On the one hand for people who will perform what
many know as planning and a distinct stream for those who will plan and
be, dare I say it, ‘real planners’.
The third way, which is what I largely advocate, is to recognize that
there is a core body of knowledge that will serve the planner well but
that the concept of planning is a way of thinking, acting and operating
in society. It embraces a set of skills, behaviour and capacities that
are well informed by undertaking a ‘planning’ course, but that there is
a wider set of knowledge that draws upon a much more diverse range of
material than perhaps many traditional planning programs and PIA itself
has espoused. This is what I would term a core concept of ‘educating for
planning’ – as a way of thinking and operating in an increasingly
complex and confusing world. It is a world where choices are increasing,
there are demands for better information and the need to make better
decisions is increasingly paramount. Educating for planning means that
we still educate planners, that we provide planning education as we have
traditionally provided it, but that we seek to bring a wider group into
renewed and revitalized programs because we include concepts and skills
that will well serve a wider audience as well as our planners.
This paper seeks to explore these themes around some core questions,
what are our planning programs on about and what should be their focus?
How do we in planning education reconcile the range of demands that are
made in terms of what sort of roles and tasks those who graduate will be
expected to perform? The issue is clouded by the realisation that there
is a job called a ‘planner’ which involves the administration of a set
of legal and administrative systems and processes and by the fact that
there is also a vocation called a ‘planner’ that involves and embraces
and almost indefinable set of tasks and roles across a range of
situations and circumstances. Rather than shy away from that dilemma and
those competing demands we should welcome this as an opportunity to
encourage a wider audience to understand planning. We should use it to
generate opportunities for others to work with and be educated with
planners. An increasingly we need to use it to find ways to regain and
revitalise a core agenda around public policy that values social
justice, community benefit, the pursuit of greater sustainability,
respect for the environment and the overall betterment of society.
Assoc Prof Lee Lik Meng
Megatrends Driving Planning Education: How do we future-proof planners?
Planning is for the future. But are
planners equipped to see into the future? Is the current set of tools we
provide planners adequate for visualising the future and do we
sufficiently evaluate and understand the emerging trends and forces and
their implications for our planning actions? This paper will discuss the
art of scenario planning and apply it to examine driving forces and
trends which will have an impact on planning education in particular and
higher education in general. The forces include globalisation,
urbanisation, an aging population which is getting younger, health,
multiple careers with shorter working lifespan, new transportation
technology, new sources of clean energy, security and terrorism, the
decline of the nation-state and the rise of big multi-national
companies, the rise of the individual, and the age of talent and
creativity as the foundation of the future economy. How will these
affect urban form? Are we paying enough attention to these forces so
that planning will remain relevant?
Two key issues which seems to be foremost on planners minds are
sustainable development and climate change and a recent survey carried
out by GPEAN in collaboration with UN-Habitat shows that about three
quarters of the more than 260 planning schools which responded said they
include sustainable development in their curriculum, although only 35%
include climate change. Is relevant knowledge fully integrated into
plan-making or are these merely fashionable labels to give the
impression of being current? Is planning education responsive enough to
help the World tackle the problems of massive urbanisation and the
growth of megacities which are at the root of unsustainability? Dongtan
in China and Masdar in Abu Dhabi are being showcased as sustainable
cities of the future - a future without cars, zero waste, zero carbon,
renewal energy, sustainable materials, food, culture, health, happiness,
fair trade, culture, heritage, habitat and wildlife. But are these the
concerns of the many Asian cities mired in poverty and urban decay?
What new sets of tools does the planner need beyond the ability to carry
out statistical analysis and projections and draw beautiful layout plans
or masterplans to solve a set of identified or perceived problems? We
not only must be able “see” into the future but must also be able to
monitor the various scenarios as they unfold and then to take
appropriate planning action to response to the challenges.
Finally, this paper addresses the question of how is higher education
evolving under the weight of globalisation, corporatisation, new
learning models, including experiential learning, Technology-Enhanced
Learning, demands of students born as digital natives, etc. and how will
planning education need to adapt to changes in the wider higher
education sector?
This paper will be exploratory in nature, intended mainly to alert
planning educators about the emerging scenarios and tools which may be
useful to planners in facing the challenges of the present and the
future.
In this presentation, I will be providing some reflections on
planning education, within Australia and internationally. I will be
using as a starting point the recent development of a postgraduate-only
professional education model at the University of Melbourne, known
colloquially as the 'Melbourne Model'. I will provide some perspectives
on whether urban planning should be an undergraduate or postgraduate
course, or a mixture of the two. I will then discuss the changing
international discourse on "reinventing planning" and how this new
internationalism might affect planning education in Australia. I will
end by providing my opinion on how best to manage the tension between
staffing the profession and changing the profession of planning in
Australia.
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