Bringing a global approach to education: the case of urban planning

Negotiating the farmland dilemmas: ‘barefoot planners’ in China’s urban periphery

“…Social practice is a process of generating social learning (Wakely et al, 1976)" (Friedmann and Abonyi, 1976, page 938, original emphasis). A quite similar, albeit much less documented, theoretical proposition arose later from Zinn et al's (1993) study of planning education in a globalisation context. Like Friedmann, they called for learning in situ from the often informal planning practice by local people rather than relying solely on expert planning knowledge:…”

“…Each of the three cases illustrates a failure of the official stateled farmland planning system. In the meantime, all of the cases also reflect the existence of highly localised negotiation-based informal planning mechanisms, led by actors such as local entrepreneurs, ethnic minority farmers, and village committee members, who manage to address the variegated practical tensions related to farmland conversion as 'barefoot planners' (Zinn et al, 1993).…”

“…" the barefoot planner approach … [is to train planners to have] a simple set of tools and selectively apply them to understand and develop locally appropriate solutions to problems. It also promotes the 'practice of practice', and reflection on the process, as a means to equip the practitioner to operate effectively in new or unique situations (Schon, 1983" (Zinn et al, 1993. One may argue that this kind of barefoot planner approach, as an example of social learning, is indeed much needed in China, especially given the dominance of state-centric technorationalist planning discourse vis-à-vis the pervasiveness of informal and sometimes even illegal local planning practice (Deng and Huang, 2004;He et al, 2009;Tang and Chung, 2002;Wang and Scott, 2008;Wu et al, 2012).…”

‘Go, and Do Thou Likewise’?

“…Or the employer might seize 1 Resources local context, and contacts with the profession and industry are most strongly developed at the local level, the increasingly globalised nature of planning practice is downplayed. Globalisation of planning practice and planning education is becoming increasingly important (Zinn : et al 1993). Use of accessible local resources is likely to reinforce the local focus of practice education, unless deliberately combined with approaches embracing global issues.…”

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“…It has also prevented thus far -the development and wide-spread adoption 4 of international accreditation of planning education programmes (e.g., Harrison, 2003;Frank et al, 2012). The debate on whether planning programmes designed to educate professionals for Western, industrialised countries and economies offer knowledge and skills relevant for addressing issues in the developing world Burayidi, 1993;Zinn et al, 1993;Watson, 2008;UN Habitat, 2009) or whether such programmes present a kind of academic colonialisation is an illustration of this discourse in the planning field.…”