Educating spatial planners for the age of co-creation: the need to risk community, science and practice involvement in planning programmes and curricula

Abstract

Planners are often billed as leaders and change agents of the (un)built environment. It is, however, important to recognize that they are in reality only one of many players in a sea of actors involved in shaping future developments and projects. Plans and interventions today are co-created and in fact co-evolve relying as much on the input, cooperation and actions of inhabitants, users, developers, politicians as on expert planners and a wide variety of other professions. In this introductory section, we, as editors of this special issue, posit that planners therefore require skills for co-creation drawing on science and working with other disciplines. In turn, planning programmes and curricula need to incorporate learning and teaching approaches that prepare students in higher education for working in co-creation settings by purposefully exposing them to learning environments that involve community, science and practice. The collection of papers, which were presented initially at the 2014 Association of European Schools of Planning congress in Utrecht hereafter showcase curriculum developments and pedagogical research of planning educators from different world regions that in the round shed light on a variety of issues and challenges of embedding learning and teaching for co-creation and co-evolution. In particular, we elaborate on the tensions of employing transformational yet high-risk pedagogies in higher education settings that are becoming increasingly risk-averse and streamlined and we suggest an agenda for planning curriculum development.