Abstract
Global student mobilities have led to different perspectives on urbanity and planning culture travelling at high speed around the globe. During experiences of mobility what is conceptualised as ‘urban’ changes, bringing with it alterations in discourses on planning practices and planning cultures. Such student mobilities and their shaping of local urban imaginations, as well as the effects of returnees entering local job markets, have not specifically been addressed in urban studies. This paper aims to analyse how the mobilities of students – and thus of knowledge – shape persistent or newly emerging urbanisms, planning practices and cultures. Conceptually, the paper elaborates how the production of urban spaces has to be understood in a context of the global mobilities of knowledge and ever-shifting local planning cultures. In the empirical analysis, the paper draws on qualitative interviews conducted with planning professionals in Dhaka on the (global) education and career trajectories of urban planners, and the dynamics of local planning cultures and practices.
Highlights
In December 2012, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) hosted a ‘Dialogue on Student Mobility from Bangladesh’ in Dhaka
Dr Nazrul Islam, the IOM launched a desk review study on Bangladesh student mobility, concluding ‘that unlike conventional media reports about “brain drain”, legal student mobility is useful for the economy of the foreign country as well as home country, especially when they return’ (IOM, n.d.)
The urban planning departments in Bangladesh universities face serious resource constraints, given that at times more than 50 percent of their faculty is on study leave
Summary
In December 2012, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) hosted a ‘Dialogue on Student Mobility from Bangladesh’ in Dhaka. The paper closes with a discussion of the new perspectives offered by thinking about global mobilities and cities, considering educational migrants as mobile subjects who can potentially influence planning cultures; it further outlines an emerging research agenda for urban researchers. Old educational hubs in Europe and North America increasingly compete with emerging knowledge centres in the Middle East and the AsiaPacific region, potentially destabilising the long-time hegemony of the Euro-American academic world (Jöns and Hoyler, 2013) This has implications for the new mobilities of knowledge and the emergence of urban theory and practices that seek to decentre Western cities (Robinson, 2006)
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