Planning Education for All Seasons:

Integration and Diversity in Theory and Practice

by

Tony Dorcey, Sandra Bicego, John Friedmann, Leonie Sandercock, Maged Senbel and Sarah Slack*.

Summary

As part of its 50th Anniversary celebrations the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, in collaboration with the Association of Canadian University Planning Programs, brought together 45 practitioners, students and educators including representatives of 14 planning programs to discuss future directions for Canadian planning education. It was concluded that the curriculum for planning education needs to become more integrated and diversify to meet the opportunities and challenges in prospect. Three strategies are key: (i) expand Canadian planning research to provide materials for the education of Canadian planners; (ii) develop programs to support life-long learning in planning; and (iii) develop and network specialized planning education programs across the country to maximize opportunities with limited resources.

To launch the year-long celebration of its 50th Anniversary the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) organized a workshop on new directions in planning education on the day before the 2002 CIP Conference. The event was jointly sponsored by the Association of Canadian University Planning Programs (ACUPP) and held in UBC's new downtown campus at Robson Square. This article highlights major conclusions from the discussions and is published in Plan Canada 42.3 (2002).

In preparation for the workshop practitioners, educators and students were invited to respond to four questions which were distributed by email across the country:

1. What challenges for planning education in Canada do you see arising from current/prospective changes in (a) world conditions and (b) conditions at home?
2. What planning roles do you see becoming more salient over the next decade?
3. What will be the critical skills required of planners over the next decade?
4. What approaches to planning education do you see becoming more important over the next decade?

Responses were received from 19 people (7 practitioners, 10 educators, 2 students).They ranged from short sentences through a couple of pages for each question as well as appended papers. This input was summarized under each of the questions and circulated to registrants in advance (Input Summary).

45 people registered for the workshop and among them were representatives of 14 planning programs in Canada. While participants were equally divided among practitioners, students and educators in terms of their self-identified primary activity, a significant indication of today's emerging realities was that many pointed out how they are involved in at least two and sometimes three of the activities (e.g. a practitioner who is teaching part-time as an Adjunct Professor and also taking courses for continuing professional development).

At the workshop the facilitators presented a brief overview of their perspective on the input as a basis for addressing each of the four questions, taken in turn and using three breakout groups each of which contained a mix of practitioners, educators and students. A concluding session focused on summarizing the results and identifying next steps (Agenda, facilitators introductory comments to sessions 1, 2 and 3 , and flip chart notes from each breakout discussion table 1, 2 and 3.)

During the workshop the emphasis was on identifying participants views and facilitating discussion of them. Differences in views were evident and variously reflected the differing contexts for planning education and practice across the country and the varying perspectives of students, practitioners and educators. If we had endeavoured to reach consensus these differences would undoubtedly have been revealed more sharply. However, it is notable that there were extensive commonalities among the ideas that emerged from the discussions among the three separate breakout groups. The highlights below draw on both the advance input and the discussions at the workshop and focus particularly on the commonalities as perceived by the facilitators and the lead author in particular.

A Time for Planning and Planners

Some of the most often repeated issues that were seen to be challenging planners now and in the coming decade were: globalization, migration, population growth, poverty, food, security, consumerism, technological change, diversity, infrastructure, climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, congestion, urban growth, rural decline, aging populations, polarization, disenfranchisement, privatization, fiscal restraint, and de-regulation. Many were encouraged by the extent to which these issues are being discussed daily in the media but often there was concern about willingness of governments, citizens and business to consider real change. There was general recognition that these issues are surrounded by major uncertainties from the global to the local level and that planning education and research in Canada needs to give much more attention to them. There was a strong feeling that there has never been a more appropriate time for planning and planners even though this may not be as widely recognized in the wider population as we might like. Participants urged that we "have courage", "be prepared to take risks", and "be strategic and pragmatic" while "supporting our students belief that they can save the world".

Integrating and Diversifying Planning Education

From this perspective it was felt that planning education needs to become both more integrated and diverse, while building on the general guidelines that have been established by CIP and the U.S. Planning Accreditation Board and recognizing that graduates are embarking on diverse "planning" careers not only with governments and business but also civil society organizations. One group modeled the nature of the desired changes by showing overlapping circles, representing subject areas, which increase in number, diameter and overlap through time (Figure 1). This implied that the foundation degree at the bachelors or masters level should continue to produce generalists with a specialization but that the core curriculum needs to expand and the specializations diversify. Further, the education of planners needs to be reframed in a context of lifelong learning through multiple development opportunities and the continuing expansion of core competency acquired through serial specialization and reflection on the job (the same group used diagrams of ladders, webs and matrices to illustrate these ideas).

There were a number of ways in which the circle model was used to illustrate the various types of integration and diversification of knowledge and skills that were seen as meriting greater priority, notably:

• Include three circles of sustainability in core: Planners need to better understand the bio-physical, socio-economic and political-institutional dimensions of sustainability, in particular their system interdependencies and their associated extensions of spatial (local-global) and temporal (present to future generations) boundaries.
• Enrich the core appreciation of ethics, empowerment and the value-laden nature of planning: Progressive practice in contexts of increasing diversity and uncertainty demand this.
• Restore urban design to core: An essential component of the expanding core should be urban design, which is seen to be undergoing a renaissance.
• Extend core competencies: Several areas of core competence can no longer be neglected, in particular finance, politics, and organizational development including management and leadership.
• Enhance core communication skills: Communication and process skills are increasingly critical for facilitating interactions among highly diverse individuals and "knowledges"; using oral, graphic and written forms; employing negotiation, facilitation and mediation techniques; capable of team-building, teamwork, relationship building, and networking; and adept in the use of information technology.
• Facilitate planning related professions working together: Planners, architects, landscape architects, civil engineers, biologists and foresters and a growing diversity of other professionals need an enhanced capacity for working together.

Learning For All Seasons

Innovations in the approaches to planning education were seen to be essential to address these curriculum needs, in particular:

• The focus should be on learning for planning practice, integrating theory and practice, and practicing inter- and trans-disciplinarity.
• The approaches should be applied, hands-on, practical and real world; utilize studios, workshops and practicums; include group/team projects and case and field studies in the community; and exploit learning-by-doing and cooperative learning.
• Continuing professional development, career-long learning and meeting the needs of non-traditional students will require programs that are short/intensive, conveniently scheduled for evenings/weekends, supplemented by information technologies, distance learning and mid-career options.
• Practitioners should be more fully involved as instructors, mentor/coaches, "practitioners-in-residence", and recruited to fill vacancies in the full-time professoriate.

Next Steps

While the record of each Canadian planning education program is different, each is able to indicate various ways in which they have been moving over the last decade in the direction of the changes identified. Nevertheless the basic conclusion from the workshop is that the rate of change needs to be accelerated and that three issues are fundamentally important to success:

• Expand Canadian planning research: In many instances the knowledge does not exist for educating planners about major forces for change (e.g. potential positive and negative impacts of globalization to be addressed in local planning in Canada). Incentives need to be increased for focusing research on Canadian planning issues to counter-balance strong pressures for internationalization of research.
• Convert to life-long learning in planning: First degrees in planning need to be redesigned with the expectation that the planning profession commits to continuing professional development (e.g. include planning modules in high school curricula; develop linkages between undergraduate and graduate programs in planning; and redesign the traditional two-year masters by adding post-graduate programs to meet needs for additional knowledge and skills).
• Develop and network specialized planning education programs: Given the limited resources it is essential that each planning education program in Canada develop a comparative advantage in selected areas and that opportunities for accessing these programs be facilitated (e.g. student and professor exchanges, students gaining partial degree credit from other institutions and internet-based delivery of courses across the country).

Participants in the workshop felt that it is important to continue and expand the dialogue initiated at this one-day event, as well as act on some of the key ideas:

• ACUPP should collaborate with CIP and affiliates in organizing a one-day workshop on planning education in advance of the national conference each year beginning with the 2003 meetings in Halifax.
• ACUPP, CIP and affiliates should cross-link their web sites to provide ready access to the web sites for planning education programs in Canada and each of the programs should ensure their sites contain up-to-date information on their course offerings and research activities.
• ACUPP should consider developing collections of thematic papers from the annual meetings that could contribute to the proposed journal publication program and development of Canadian planning education materials.

A major goal of SCARP's 50th Anniversary events planned for the coming year is to advance our ideas on future directions for planning education and research. Please follow the discussion (http://www.tonydorcey.ca) and send any comments on the conclusions from this initial workshop to Tony Dorcey (dorcey@interchange.ubc.ca).

Authors:

Tony Dorcey, Leonie Sandercock and John Friedmann are faculty members and Sandra Bicego, Sarah Slack and Maged Senbel are graduate students in the School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia.

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Figure 1