Abstract
Urban planning as a networked field of governance can be an essential contributor for de-colonising planning education and shaping pathways to urban equality. Educating planners with the capabilities to address complex socio-economic, environmental and political processes that drive inequality requires critical engagement with multiple knowledges and urban praxes in their learning processes. However, previous research on cities of the global South has identified severe quantitative deficits, outdated pedagogies, and qualitative shortfalls in current planning education. Moreover, the political economy and pedagogic practices adopted in higher education programmes often reproduce Western-centric political imaginations of planning, which in turn reproduce urban inequality. Many educational institutions across the global South, for example, continue teaching colonial agendas and fail to recognise everyday planning practices in the way cities are built and managed. This article contributes to a better understanding of the relation between planning education and urban inequalities by critically exploring the distribution of regional and global higher education networks and their role in de-colonising planning. The analysis is based on a literature review, quantitative and qualitative data from planning and planning education networks, as well as interviews with key players within them. The article scrutinises the geography of these networks to bring to the fore issues of language, colonial legacies and the dominance of capital cities, which, among others, currently work against more plural epistemologies and praxes. Based on a better understanding of the networked field of urban planning in higher education and ongoing efforts to open up new political imaginations and methodologies, the article suggests emerging room for manoeuvre to foster planner’s capabilities to shape urban equality at scale.
Highlights
Realising the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11— ’Making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ (United Nations [UN], 2015)— demands urban planners with the capabilities to address complex socio-economic, environmental and political processes
Aligned with the notion of planning as a networked field of governance, which demands radical change at scale, we focus on the role of planning education networks, which are umbrella associations that link different schools in the field
We provided an analysis of the geographies of planning education networks through mapping and interviews, thereby raising multiple interrelated issues like geographical density and gaps, language, colonial legacies, gaps between academia and planning practice, and the role of professional accreditation in either hindering or advancing planning approaches that talk to context-specific urban equality challenges
Summary
The third dimension, parity of participation, is essential for opening up the political space for learners to activate their agency and utilise their capacities This requires working towards an equality of capabilities, whereby addressing power relations is fundamental to entitle learners to access education and implement their learning into reflective action with a justice-oriented intent (Walker, 2006). The analysis is based on a literature review and online repositories of national, regional and global planning education and professional planner’s associations Secondary data from these networks, which includes the names and location of members, membership requirements and categories, were used to develop a series of maps, which, in turn, served as an input for interrogating issues of urban inequalities in 19 semi-structured interviews. The reasons and implications of absences and presences in planning education networks are highly contextual and are best interpreted through consideration of the historical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural conditions that shape UPE in specific geographies
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