Although the importance of physical planning has gained recognition over the last 20 years, planning education has lagged, becoming less relevant to the needs of graduates who are required to take many courses peripheral to jobs offered by state and local agencies, and by consulting firms.
Unfortunately, few planners' training includes detailed study of traditional towns and cities, or new and emerging urban forms meeting 21st century challenges. Planning students are generally not required to analyze how the scale and arrangement of a community’s component parts (such as neighborhoods, streets and boulevards, parks and open spaces) contribute to its functioning as a livable, walkable, bikeable, sustainable place.
Many planning schools have focused instead on demographic trend analysis, sociology, engineering basics, planning theory, land-use law, public policy formulation, citizen participation, quantitative methods, transportation planning, social and health planning, local planning administration, gender studies, and GIS. All of these are important (particularly engineering basics as they pertain to slopes and hydrology), but it is curious that one of the profession’s central subjects (i.e., the physical layout of towns and cities) is studied so little.
As Prof. Tom Campanella of UNC has observed, “Once the traditional focus of physical planning was lost, the profession was effectively without a keel. It became fragmented, creating a chronic identity crisis — a nagging uncertainty about purpose and relevance…By forgoing its traditional focus and expanding too quickly, planning became a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.” In the view of Prof. Eugenie Birch of the University of Pennsylvania, “Planning schools place too much emphasis on subfields such that students do not identify with being planners or with the sole distinguishing feature of the profession -- the town planning or physical planning knowledge that should unite the field”
As a result, planning education at most universities significantly underserves the needs of their graduates. In the words of Karen Hundt, who directs the Community Design Group at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency, “Because too many planners focus on zoning and land use, rather than on three-dimensional aspects, they often cannot visualize what the codes and policies they write will produce.”
Doug Kelbaugh, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Michigan, adds that “cities and towns need more generalists to complement specialists on their staffs. If MUP graduates had more urban design and physical planning skills, it would improve our communities, as well as their career prospects."
The committees determining academic accreditation standards should take notice and greatly expand the number of their members who understand and appreciate the spatial and physical (as well as the economic, ecological, and social) aspects of community design. Otherwise, it is unlikely that curriculum imbalances will be redressed, as the ever-growing list of required nondesign courses crowds out opportunities for design training. As Prof. Emily Talen of Arizona State University notes, “I've never agreed that education for planners should elevate economic theory and methods above urban design. Why should input-output analysis be more important to an urban planner than knowing the elements of a walkable street?” The problem is so critical that some planning firms prefer hiring landscape architecture graduates instead of planners, as they possess solid design backgrounds and can learn most technical aspects of planning on the job.
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