Challenges, opportunities and legacies: experiencing the internationalising of UK planning curricula across space and time

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with selected UK planning academics and survey results from current planning practitioners, this article provides valuable and timely perspectives on how internationalisation is experienced by those within and beyond the immediate institutional context. Although internationally focused planning education helps planners tackle the manifold urban challenges in the global South, the article goes on to argue that relational approaches hold much promise for planners working in so-called developed countries, including the UK, to understand the diverse needs of different diasporic communities. Such knowledge is crucial to develop sustainable planning solutions in the face of uneven processes of urban development.

Engaged Urban Pedagogy

“…Aspiring planners must be taught about the difficulties of practice, and be aware of the challenges they will face and their ability to deliver transformative change, even at a small scale. Planning educators here play a crucial role, and this has important consequences in the way planners are taught not only in their home country but also in the international landscape of international planning education (Adams et al, 2020). Crucially, engaged pedagogy founded on agility and adaptability is a starting point to help planners to build stronger, inclusive and sustainable places.…”

Europe and the people without planning: reconsidering British interventions in colonial Hong Kong

“…Colonial endeavours in turn often appear as backdrops to accounts of planning's development rather than being understood as fundamental to the dominance of the European discipline (see, for example, Amati and Freestone, 2009;Hall, 2002). Two recent papers published in this journal have given critical attention to the urgent need to integrate postcolonial and decolonial perspectives within the discipline's British pedagogy (Adams et al, 2020;Wood, 2020). The geographer Astrid Wood (2020), for instance, emphasises the importance of a renewed consideration of how southern theory enables us to rethink our understandings and accounts of urbanism in the global North within a decolonial agenda.…”