De-Colonising Planning Education? Exploring the Geographies of Urban Planning Education Networks

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 However, previous research on cities of the global South has identified severe quantitative deficits, outdated pedagogies, and qualitative shortfalls in current planning education.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.

Planning Cities in Africa—Current Issues and Future Prospects of Urban Governance and Planning: An Introduction

“…For the most part, planning education and practice in Africa are rooted in and originated from its colonial past. Theories, the ideal of "city" and urbaneness are hence derived from a Euro-American urbanism and sociocultural context (Diouf and Fredericks 2014;Wesely and Allen 2019). In fact, planning practice in the region is associated with rationalist master planning approaches and inappropriate strategies, which are developed for other sociocultural and economic contexts, in dealing with actual urban problems (Watson 2014a;Cirolia and Berrisford 2017;Ewing 2021).…”

Untitled

“…A range of other calls for decolonizing planning can be drawn from the field of planning education (Wesley and Allen, 2019;Marques and Rishi, 2021). For example, Sunderasan (2019) discusses decolonization of urban pedagogy in India through his experience at a graduate level program.…”

Urban Plans and Conflicting Interests in Sustainable Cross-Boundary Land Governance, the Case of National Urban and Regional Plans in Ethiopia

“…Since then, planning, at least in theory, has evolved from rational technocratic thinking to communication using concepts borrowed from social and cultural studies [6][7][8][9]. In practice, however, while spatial planning has taken diverse forms mainly in western countries underpinned by national and regional socio-cultural and political contexts [10], it has stagnated at the ethos of past colonial heritage in the Global South [8,9,[11][12][13][14]. Yet, the core principle of planning remains foreseeing and preparing for the future [2].…”

“…This has contributed to limited resources and debates on the qualities and nature of African cities. At the same time, planning education in Africa continues to depend on imported concepts and models developed in completely different socioeconomic and cultural contexts [14,19]. Planners are trained with planning theories containing universalized assumptions of urban communities and ideal images of a proper city that may be different from realities on the ground [11], whereas residents of cities in Africa, their daily life embedded in their informal networks and socioeconomic activities, are considered as subjects of planning that should be ordered and formalized [11,20].…”