Educating planning professionals to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions – a survey of planning schools in Europe

ABSTRACT

In this paper we address the question of whether academic educational planning programmes are prepared to provide future planning professionals with the essential expertise to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions. Drawing upon interviews with master’s programme directors and involved academic teachers from European schools of planning, we argue that in view of transformative planning there is a need for adjustments in terms of knowledge areas and methodological skills. Our results also suggest reconsideration of normative and ethical aspects of planning as well as the attributed roles of planners and planning educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable transformation
• carbon-free cities
• planning education
• curriculum
• planners’ roles

Introduction

Transforming our cities and regions for a carbon-free future entails a number of seminal as well as normative implications, as it involves different political, social, technological, and institutional dimensions as well as sectoral issue-areas (Patterson et al., 2017; Schreuder & Horlings, 2022). Similarly, in recent years, the academic discourse in the spatial planning domain has focused not only on the potentialities and implications of smart technologies, but also on social innovations and changed values as well as experimental forms of governance. Since spatial planning involves setting up a series of temporal, spatial and institutional connections (Madanipour, 2010), planning professionals are often assigned a key role of managing, if not even advocating, the desired sustainable but complex and conflictual transformation of cities and regions (von Wirth et al., 2019). Yet the concrete agency of planning and planners is dependent on a number of context-related institutional and cultural conditions (Reimer, 2013) as well as opportunities for co-creation in a ‘sea of actors’ (Rooij & Frank, 2016). However, one critical question, which is rather overlooked as we will show, is whether academic educational programmes in spatial planning actually keep pace with such demands and expectations, namely to educate future planning professionals with the essential expertise for their potential role as change agents, that is required to promote the intended transformation to carbon-free cities and regions (Hölscher & Frantzeskaki, 2021).

In this paper, we shed light on this question by drawing upon results from interviews with master’s programme directors and involved academic teachers representing eight planning schools across Europe and their respective programmes. First, we discuss some of the key contributions to the literature on urban transformations and what we can learn in terms of required capacities and capabilities for spatial planners. After that, we reflect upon those contributions in recent years that have addressed these aspects from a planning educational point of view. Thereafter, we explain our methodological approach, before we discuss the findings from our interviews with master’s programme directors and involved academic teachers. In the final section we argue that educating the next generation of planning professionals to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions does not only imply a need for adjustments in terms of (technological) knowledge areas and methodological skills, but also a need to reconsider normative and ethical values and the attributed roles of planners and planning educators.

The “urban transformation” debate and its implications for planning and planners

For the past 20 years there has been an increasing focus on the role that cities play in reducing their climate impact (Hodson & Marvin, 2010; Hölscher & Frantzeskaki, 2021). From a planner’s perspective, as Hölscher et al. (2022) note, it is key to have an understanding of planning processes and juridical components, but also of planetary boundaries (e.g. regarding food, water and energy; health and well-being), social equity, gender equality, and governance, for instance. In parallel, a number of scholars argue that a ‘transformative turn’ has emerged in urban studies (Hölscher & Frantzeskaki, 2021; Monstadt et al., 2022), which underscores the roles of cities and local governance in sustainability transitions (Geels, 2011; Bulkeley et al., 2015). Related research has focused extensively on various forms of local actions aimed at reducing climate impacts (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2013; Bulkeley et al., 2015), including specific types of experiments, such as urban laboratories and urban living labs (Evans & Karvonen, 2014; Voytenko et al., 2016; Marvin et al., 2018; von Wirth et al., 2019) or urban test beds (Berglund-Snodgrass & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2020; Eneqvist, 2022), and the potential capacity of such experiments for urban transformation (Wolfram, 2016; Wolfram et al., 2019).

Hölscher and Frantzeskaki (2021) argue that the notion of urban transformation includes complex processes of radical and systemic change incorporating social, institutional, cultural, political, economic, technological, and ecological domains, and it can be summarised as follows:

[It] guides and formulates a better understanding of urban change. On the one hand, ‘transformation’ serves as an analytical lens to describe and understand the continuous, complex and contested processes and dynamics manifesting in cities […] On the other hand, the transformation perspective provides a normative orientation that emphasises the need for radical and systemic change in order to overcome persistent social, environmental and economic problems and to purposefully move towards sustainable and resilient cities in the long term. (Hölscher & Frantzeskaki, 2021, pp. 3–4)

In this vein, McCormick et al. (2013, p. 4) underline the difference between sustainable urban transformation and sustainable urban development.

Sustainable urban transformation places a stronger emphasis on structural transformation processes, both multi-dimensional and radical change, which can effectively direct urban development towards sustainability. Put simply, sustainable urban development is primarily about development in urban areas while sustainable urban transformation is about development or change of urban areas. (McCormick et al., 2013, p. 4)

They further argue that conventional approaches to urban planning are inadequate. Therefore, sustainable urban transformations necessitate new modes of innovative local governance that offer opportunities for visionary plans, transition management, disruptive activities, and entrepreneurial change agents (McCormick et al., 2013).

This multi-layered and complex understanding of urban change originates particularly from a sociotechnical perspective on transition studies (Geels, 2002; Geels & Schot, 2010; Markard et al., 2012). In this literature, the focus is on how systemic change occurs, and more specifically how sectors, actors, and levels (called niches, regimes, and landscapes) co-evolve and create windows of opportunity for transitions. In the transition literature, the focus is often on regime change in specific sub-systems, for example decarbonisation of electricity or transport systems, based on sociotechnical analysis of the interplay between social, technological, institutional, and economic components (Geels, 2002; Markard et al., 2012). The transformation literature is often centred on large-scale societal change processes involving social-ecological interactions (Hölscher et al., 2022). However, a key component in both types of literature is the role of actors and how they shape desirable transitions and transformations through agency and governance (Hölscher et al., 2018), or in other words, through social interaction processes, in which planners may play an important role.

In order to promote such transformation processes, Bulkeley et al. (2015) propose a three-step analytical framework to explore and explain the ways in which experimentation can become a central part of urban climate change governance. The steps include ‘making’, ‘maintaining’, and ‘living’ experiments. All steps focus on including relevant actors with diverse competences to problematise and frame the issues at hand. Maintaining experiments entails keeping actors involved and circulating ideas and learning in order to make ‘metabolic adjustments’. Also, the experiments are supposed to align with existing structures, and finally, to be lived and taken up in the daily practices of individuals and institutions. As such, much of the urban experimentation literature focuses on governance aspects, and the roles of politics, institutions, and relevant actors in order to address the challenges of climate change locally, but in many cases the explicit focus on planners is lacking. However, there are a few exceptions. Some recent contributions address the mixed feelings that urban planners have around experiments, since different institutional logics clash in practice (Scholl & De Kraker, 2021; Eneqvist et al., 2022). Berglund-Snodgrass and Mukhtar-Landgren (2020) identified that urban planners in a Nordic context (still) think using a public sector logic, based on a traditional view of planning as a municipal, democratic and bureaucratic exercise. The experimenting logic is rather based around learning, testing, being collaborative, and innovative, as a way to go beyond business as usual. These two logics, the public sector and the experimenting one, do not always work together. In parallel, criticism is being raised against what is called a ‘projectification’ of urban planning, as experiments are often run as isolated projects, based on and limited by external funding, and characterised by rather modest learning exchange, unambitious incrementalism (Torrens & von Wirth, 2021), and weak democratic legitimacy (Eneqvist et al., 2022). However, these specific experimental environments underline the planners’ roles as meta-governors (Sehested, 2009) bringing together different types of actors, which is hardly addressed in the current literature.

Another related strand of literature is on urban transformative capacity (UTC), with a particular focus on how transformations and transitions of urban practices, sociotechnical systems, and processes towards higher levels of sustainability can be achieved, and which factors ‘enable cities and urban stakeholders to purposefully initiate and perform such transitions’ (Wolfram, 2016, p. 121). Capacity refers to how characteristics of agency and structure affect the possibilities of making societal transformations. Wolfram (2016, p. 126) defines UTC as:

The collective ability of the stakeholders involved in urban development to conceive of, prepare for, initiate and perform path-deviant change towards sustainability within and across multiple complex systems that constitute the cities they relate to. It is a qualitative measure for an emergent property that reflects attributes of urban stakeholders, their interactions, and the context they are embedded in.

In the UTC framework attention is mainly given to areas that are located within urban contexts or have obvious implications for cities. A specific emphasis is laid on how, through cognitive and social processes, stakeholders are enabled to recognise systemic path dependencies due to an advanced understanding of resources, power relations, and the obduracy of physical structures (e.g. buildings and technical infrastructure) (Wolfram, 2016; Wolfram et al., 2019). The framework can be instrumental in considering critical preconditions and thus potential tasks for and capabilities of planners, when supporting radical urban change towards sustainability, as it focuses on learning, collaboration, community building, and understanding complex structures.

A recent paper by Frantzeskaki (2022) focuses specifically on the skills of urban actors and planners that are required to implement transformative urban governance. She takes her departure from implementing ideas from transition management, a theoretical stream coming from the transition literature. She argues that there is a need for both vocational and academic skills, which must both be utilised in various parts of the planning process. Vocational skills include thematic knowledge (for example about urban resilience), creativity, critical thinking and identifying multiple actors, theory application skills (by connecting visual ideas and narratives with places or applying the concept of the experiment to places), collaboration and teamwork skills, and diplomatic skills (through e.g. forging partnerships and mobilising networks). Academic skills include methodological competence and learning capacity (through systems thinking and receptivity to learning from experiments), analytical crafts (choosing the right medium to communicate and to analyse results), and proficiency in oral and written communication. Several of these skills are not necessarily traditionally associated with urban/spatial planning.

To sum up, the presented literature focuses on local governance practices and stresses the importance of collaboration, learning, and experimentation to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions, but also the importance of system change within diverse sectors, at different spatial scales, and at various institutional levels. More specifically, the literature emphasises a number of skills, capacities and capabilities. Many of them relate to what is often associated with contemporary planning work, namely to broaden actor involvement and to facilitate (co-creative) processes, but also to take into consideration the potentials and implications of technological advancements. However, what is rather lacking in the literature is to clearly address how (radical) urban transformation processes will affect the work of planners more specifically. Also, the specific focus on cities leads to neglect other types of territories that are also relevant for the transformation towards carbon-free societies and that planners need to engage with.

Towards carbon-free cities and regions – views from debates about planning education

Almost 20 years ago, Campbell (2006, p. 201) remarked that the implications of climate change ‘can appear bewildering and insurmountable’ and ‘out of the ordinary’ for the spatial planning community. For our discussion in the following, the key question is how this ‘out of the ordinary’ has been dealt with in academic programmes for planning education in recent years. Since, as Rooji and Frank (Rooij & Frank, 2016, p. 474) underline, the urban environment changes, and the societal and political contexts too, this demands a regular review of planning curricula content and learning outcomes to address perceived mismatches in skills and knowledge needs for practice. However, a closer look at the available literature shows that the above-mentioned key question is neither dealt with systematically nor in a cross-national comparative perspective. One example is the large European review of 21st-century study programmes undertaken by a number of planning scholars actively involved within AESOP, the Association of European Schools of Planning (Frank et al., 2014). Here, for instance, the increasing pluralism and diversity of education models in the aftermath of the so-called Bologna reform are intensively discussed, but there is only sporadic consideration of how the issue of climate change or the role of planning and planners in promoting carbon-free cities and regions, or similar challenges, are incorporated into planning educational programmes.

Also, the initiative ‘Planners 4 Climate Action’, which is convened by the UN-HABITAT, ‘found that there is little data on how climate change issues are considered in urban planning education or practice’ (Hurlimann et al., 2021, p. 971). Exceptions are a non-representative survey with leading educators of planning schools around the globe, which reveals that only ‘seven out of 45 respondents identified climate change issues, environmental justice, and sustainability as key priorities for future planning education’ (Frank & Silver, 2018, p. 238). Also, a few national studies, focusing on the UK (Preston-Jones, 2020), the US and Canada (Hamin & Marcucci, 2013), Australia (Hurlimann et al., 2021), and Sweden (Farhangi et al., 2023) show that although some of the syllabus content and learning outcomes address a number of climate change related elements and topics at the course level, these were not integrated in a holistic manner. In addition, these studies indicate that the (changing) role of planners in addressing climate change is hardly integrated in planning courses.

In a recent paper by Varış Husar et al. (2023), who represent the coordination team of the Young Academics Network within AESOP, a number of future challenges that planners may face are identified. These include climate change, but also digitalisation, spatial injustice and political and economic instabilities. In order to cope with these, the authors argue that planners should be particularly able to work in an inter-, multi-, or trans-disciplinary manner and should be versatile in taking on different roles. Tunström (2018) argues in a similar vein. She reminds us that planning professionals need to bridge disciplinary boundaries and to deal with a number of normative claims to cope with ‘wicked problems’, such as climate change. However, in view of educating planners, she sees the risk of promoting primarily feel-good concepts, such as sustainability or resilience, since these concepts are hardly unpacked to work with in practice. Therefore, she claims that conveying a critical approach to the students is (still) a central issue in debates on planning education. However, in this view, one key issue is, as Tasan-Kok et al. (2018, p. 26) put it,

[h]ow to equip planning students with the necessary critical thinking skills to instil in them a sense of curiosity and a wish to explore and make sense of their worlds, while at the same time imbuing them with the desire, skills, and tenacity to pursue, find and implement innovative ways of responding to the complex challenges they are sure to encounter?

Their question touches upon the often-voiced criticism of planning education, namely that it focuses ‘on skills, such as communicative skills and project management skills, and on the need for new tools, instead of on the mindsets of the future practitioner and norms and values in planning’ (Tunström, 2018, p. 46). This coincides well with the claims by Varış Husar et al. (2023), since they argue that a future education framework should not only strengthen the awareness and reactions towards current crises, but should also reconsider value systems that have dominated planning education in the past and, finally, should develop the audacity to shift planning mindsets to respond to current problems.

Another key argument in the literature is that since planning problems, such as climate change, are often categorised as ‘wicked’ (Campbell, 2006), spatial planning is ‘a particular type of (scientific) approach that is distinct from the empirical sciences […] with its own academic profile’ (Rooij & Frank, 2016, p. 476) and that ‘is both physical and social, descriptive and normative, analytical and applied, theoretical and practical, as well as a multi-, trans-, and inter-disciplinary concept and activity’ (Tunström, 2018, p. 46). This particular type requires, according to Rooij and Frank (Rooij & Frank, 2016, p. 476), ‘an integrative – comprehensive education model’ with a focus on understanding different forms of knowledge (including technological expertise), and scientific traditions, and on co-creation strategies and ‘the ability to act positively in the face of complexity, uncertainty and unknown futures’ (ibid). The latter point touches on the aforementioned required audacity of planners, but also the versatility of planning roles (Othengrafen & Levin-Keitel, 2019; Varış Husar et al., 2023), often with an emphasis on facilitating or managing collaborative processes (Sehested, 2009; Fox-Rogers & Murphy, 2016). It also alludes to the criticism that planners belong to a ‘silenced profession’ that is characterised by loyal servants that do not articulate views that may contradict politicians (Grange, 2017), whereas for taking transformative actions, troublesome decisions and leadership capacities are demanded. This is underscored by Albrechts (2018, p. 292), who says that

[p]lanning education has to be aware that the role of planners cannot be reduced to mere facilitators, enablers, or coordinators, but that they have to play an active role (such as opening the spectrum of possibilities) in planning processes. […] This implies an activist mode of planning. […] In this way, planning is undoubtedly a political process.

Consequently, specifically in view of the envisaged transformation of our societies towards carbon-free cities and regions, in recent years a discussion has emerged about ‘planners as change agents, future-makers and -shapers, community heroes, justice distributors, deliberative or reflective practitioners, dreamers’ (Tasan-Kok et al., 2018, p. 4), whereas, according to Albrechts (2018, p. 289), it is required that

[t]ransformative practices focus on new concepts and new ways of thinking that change the way resources are (re)used, (re)distributed, and (re)allocated, and the way the regulatory powers are exercised. In order to imagine the conditions and constraints differently, we need to deal with history and to overcome history. […] [t]ransformative practices take decision-makers, planners, planning educators, institutions, and citizens out of their comfort zones […] and compel them to confront their key beliefs, to challenge conventional wisdom, and to look at the prospects of new ideas and breaking-out-of-the-box.

To follow this line of thought, Albrechts claims that planning needs to become more political, and ‘the planner should act as a mobiliser and initiator of change’ (Albrechts, 2018, p. 291). Similarly, Knieling and Klindworth (2018), who draw upon discussions in transition theory and transition management, explain that planners can be change agents and thus trigger transitions if they, quoting a report of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU, 2011, p. 245) ‘create role models, turn attitude and behaviour patterns into action patterns and are capable of motivating others’, while Lamker and Schulze Dieckhoff (2022, p. 200) add that there is a

[…] need to deepen our understanding of planners as human actors with personal characteristics and inner struggles. Planners can gain strong supportive agency and leadership in a post-growth transformation [which coincides well with ideas to plan for carbon-free cities and regions] if we engage with desires, emotions, values, and perceptions.

These claims focusing on the agency and capabilities of planners, underline, in the words of Tasan-Kok et al. (2018, p. 27), ‘the importance of recognising the personal and transformative dimension associated with professional development in planning as a future-oriented practice.’ However, this dimension is, as the authors claim, not incorporated in current debates on the planning profession or regarding the adaptation of planning curricula. They also observe that it seems rather that neighbouring disciplines, such as sustainability and transition studies, address the need for vision-driven leadership and ecological and clearly normative world views as vehicles for transformative actions, as discussed in the previous section.

Overall, the discussion in this section has shown that there is obviously an awareness that planning education might need to better integrate the implications of the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions by specifically casting the role of the planner in a different light, namely as a change agent or transformative planner. Before we turn to the discussion of to what extent this awareness is shared by programme directors and teachers involved in planning education, we briefly make some methodological notes.

Methodological notes

In order to understand how far ideas related to transformative planning are already integrated into planning education, we conducted qualitative interviews with representatives of planning programmes. In our survey, we interviewed eight programme directors or other involved teachers. This equated to ten individuals, as two representatives were present in two of the interviews. The educational programmes in question were master’s programmes, and we identified them through a two-step process.

First, we decided to select programmes of those planning schools that are members of AESOP, which means that we focused our study on European planning education. AESOP is a non-profit organisation that has the goal of advancing planning education in Europe. AESOP has just updated its Core Curriculum for a high-quality European planning education, which ‘identifies knowledge, competencies and values deemed vital for spatial planners at the start of the 21st century; and it serves as a benchmark for the evaluation of applications and admission of new member schools and their education programmes’. (AESOP, 2024, p. 1) There are approximately 150 planning schools represented in AESOP, and we consider these planning schools and their respective programmes as relevant for our study in general, as they share an understanding of planning as both a scientific concept and a profession.

Secondly, among these planning schools, through examination of their web pages and curricula, we started with the programmes that had earlier achieved AESOP Certificates of Quality Recognition, and among them we identified programmes that incorporate approaches to sustainability, climate change, or transformative planning. Most planning programmes include sustainability generally, but the identified programmes stated, either in their curricula, in courses, or in other marketing texts, that they work with sustainability, climate change, or transformative planning more specifically. All of the selected planning schools also had at least one bachelor programme, and several of them had more than one master’s program. We aimed to include a variety of European countries, recognising that there could have been several programmes included from certain countries. We identified around 15 programmes that were considered interesting to study closer, in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom, and then we contacted them via email. Among these, we considered all relevant for our survey, but not all of them were available for interviews.

The resulting eight interviews were conducted using the digital communication platform Microsoft Teams. Both authors of the paper were present during each of the interviews. The interviews usually took around 90 minutes and were recorded. They were then transcribed digitally via the transcription software in Microsoft Teams and then edited to correct errors. All interviews were conducted in English. With a few exceptions, English was not the first language for either the authors or the interviewees, meaning that there were always risks of misunderstanding. Considering that all interviewees were university teachers and researchers who have a high proficiency in using English, we do not think that this generated any concerns or risks for our analysis.

Our questions focused on five main themes: how sustainability is conceptualised and implemented in the curricula and courses; whether distinctions are made between sustainability, transition and transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions; which skills, learning outcomes and teaching activities are important in this respect; the role and feedback of practitioners; and, finally, the implications of educating planners as change agents towards carbon-free cities and regions. The interviews were then read through several times by the authors separately to get an understanding of the answers. After that, inductive and open coding was carried out (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2014), followed by a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), performed by gathering codes into potential themes and then reviewing the themes in discussions between the authors. Finally, the relevant citations that contextualised and represented the themes were selected for the final phase of writing up the paper.

Viewpoints from key representatives from European planning schools

In the next sections, we present and discuss our empirical results.

Teaching for sustainable transformation

Our first questions to our informants were targeted at understanding how in general the notion of sustainability is integrated in their master’s programmes. Here we learnt that several courses or modules prominently integrate and address a range of issues of sustainability and their relation to spatial planning. Examples are climate change and corresponding adaptation and mitigation measures, sustainable mobility, renewable energy and its integration in cities, circular economies, green infrastructures, political ecology, environmental ethics/justice, and the notion of post-growth. Also, in this context, a number of different teaching formats and activities were mentioned by our interviewees in which issues of sustainability are integrated into planning classes, such as lectures, seminars, tutorials, field trips/visits, project work and problem-based learning, but also studios or future labs/living labs. In some of these courses, efforts are undertaken to capture the ongoing policy debates regarding e.g. the EU Green Deal, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Pact of Amsterdam/Urban Agenda for the EU and what these policy documents and articulated policy norms therein mean for planning locally. Also, it was noted that the ‘notion of sustainability is not displayed in every course title. It is more of a cross-cutting issue, which is addressed in most of our classes, depending on the involved lecturers, of course.’ (Interviewee A) A related aspect is the name of the master’s programme, since some programmes use sustainability explicitly in their titles, whereas others use classical terms emphasising the disciplinary background, such as ‘spatial planning’, ‘in order to make established disciplines more recognisable for the students rather than fashionable programme labels, specifically at a time when sustainability had become inflationary with all these new market-oriented programmes across Europe.’ (Interviewee A)

Drawing upon our respondents’ answers, a common strategy involves lecturers that represent a wide spectrum of disciplines, since

we are convinced that our students have to be trained to interact with several experts trained in different disciplines [e.g. engineering, architecture, economics], therefore our students need to be able to know their language and to coordinate the different viewpoints anchored in such disciplines. (Interviewee B)

On the other hand, some of our informants pointed at limitations due to the size and/or orientation of in-house teaching staff, specifically in view of transformative planning towards carbon-free cities and regions.

It’s quite interesting because we’re situated in a geography department that does a lot of research on air pollution, climate change etc. We have access to people who do really deep, detailed research into these issues. But they don’t think in terms of policy. They’re scientists, they’re geographers, they’re fantastic, but they don’t take the step that a planner or policy maker or even politician would, namely to say okay, what do we do about it and how do we do it? They rather say, these are the facts, earth warming is problematic. These are the likely consequences, here you go. But how do you translate that into local and regional strategies? […] I think we need more discussions on how we get from knowing these things to doing things that will help us to deal with them. (Interviewee C)

However, asking more explicitly about how transformative planning is integrated into the curricula, our respondents noted that this, unlike the much more mainstreamed SDGs’, is addressed implicitly and to a much lesser extent across courses and modules. It is very much dependent on whether there is support from dedicated and qualified staff members. On the other hand, all respondents saw the need to think and act more in this direction. Examples are ‘[t]aking transformation seriously, I think it’s an aspect that has to be reflected in curriculum development and finally in the courses. But you also need the right people to teach these aspects.’ (Interviewee D) Another informant argued that ‘[t]he issue of transformation and uncertainty, due to numerous crises, is something we could work more with, but it’s also a matter of having the staff capacity and room in the curriculum’. (Interviewee C) It was also noted that there is always a sort of time lag in terms of engaging with still rather new topics, both in research and teaching. Hence, some interviewees expressed the need to be better-equipped staff-wise in the near future, to introduce the transformation to carbon-free cities and regions more broadly into teaching. Other respondents pointed out how they already addressed transformative planning in their programmes: ‘We use a number of concrete examples to discuss the notion of transformation and transition, but we don’t convey a particular concept to the students unlike some Dutch schools, where this is a well-established concept, specifically in terms of transition management’. (Interviewee A)

On the role of practitioners

As the literature review on urban transformation indicated, the relationship between theory, i.e. the conceptual underpinnings, and practice, here with a specific view on the transformative capacity of planners, is key. Hence, bringing practitioners into education is a potential way to facilitate this relationship. It may also help to meet the aforementioned shortage of available staff. Some even argued that their involvement in the curriculum development was fundamental (e.g. Interviewees A, D and E). However, one challenge in this respect may be if practitioners do not make clear to the students when they are referring to largely objective accounts of challenges on the one hand, and norm-based responses on the other. This may confuse the students (e.g. Interviewees A, E and F). Another aspect is the need to have teaching certificates from practitioners as guest lecturers, which often results in only engaging with them during excursions, student projects or living labs (Interviewee F). However, practitioners are not limited only to planning professionals but may also include societal partners in general who may be asked to make proposals for projects that students can work on, for instance (Interviewees A, E, G and H). Acknowledging in general the involvement of practitioners in different educational formats, some of our interviewees articulated reservations regarding their role in advocating transformative planning for carbon-free cities and regions, in particular when engaging with planning professionals representing public agencies.

We have a range of guest lecturers in our programme for historical reasons. Due to this we probably have a bias towards mainstream planning […] with rather established tools and approaches. These guest lecturers are surely somewhat critical thinkers and they are aware of the need for transformation, but they’re probably not at the forefront of disruptive approaches, to put it bluntly. (Interviewee A)

Therefore, it was suggested to include

more people from non-governmental organisations, from transition movements or others who take transformative actions locally, often with a more participative or even co-creative approach of practice than within formal planning […] But we are not there yet. We cooperate with such actors in our research projects, but we haven’t succeeded in making them part of our teaching activities. There could be a way to go. (Interviewee A)

Importance of theoretical comprehension and critical thinking

In principle, all respondents underlined the need for theories for construing contemporary planning practices, but also to enable critical thinking and decent analysis, underpinned by robust methods, which is key to approaching ‘wicked problems’ in planning. ‘It is not enough to be only good in technical aspects, such as GIS; you need the right vocabulary to problematise what is evolving in planning’. (Interviewee D) Another interviewee stressed that

[f]irst and foremost we want our students to become critical thinkers and to reflect upon the challenges and the concepts they are confronted with. And second, many of our students, in particular those who are more inclined towards planning practice, are eager to do case studies and fieldwork and they have some topics they’re very interested in. But they sometimes lack the interest to dive a bit deeper into theories and concepts and thus understand the international literature out there. I think we have a very important role to play in encouraging the students to read and to think outside their comfort zone. (Interviewee A)

Overall, it became clear that the idea of educating ‘reflective practitioners’ is (still) very central. However, a number of our interviewees pointed out the risk that some courses tend to be too critical, in a sense leaving the students in the doldrums, since they do not offer options for what to do. ‘I think it is also important to give students tools which may enable them to make an impact or to contribute to change’. (Interviewee E) However, in conveying reflexivity and critical thinking, many of our interviewees noted the selectivity of concepts put forward in the class, which are of course preselected by the responsible teachers and thus represent a clear bias in one or other direction. Reflecting on experiences on a course in environmental planning, one of our respondents argued that it is important to question carefully some of the key concepts and theories.

I try to explain to our students, the becoming planners, that they have to position themselves in a debate where the environment is addressed, sometimes as a resource, sometimes as a commodity, sometimes as an amenity, and sometimes as a risk. […] So, we try to show the complexity of the terms that we use. For instance, we discuss widely with the students the difference between nature, environment, ecosystem, landscape […] but at the same time try to make them aware of the fact that these concepts are not completely objective, one can approach them from different perspectives, which may imply different political choices. To understand the complexity of these concepts is important for the students. (Interviewee B)

Implications of teaching students as future change agents of transformative planning

The discussion with our interviewees on what expertise is needed for our students to act as future change agents of transformative planning brought forward a rather consistent result. This means, for instance, that we could identify a large consensus that communicative skills, both oral and visual, are key to convincing and inspiring others, which is very much in line with the literature on experiments and transformative planning. Also, it was mentioned that more than ever it is important to be able to work across institutional structures and sectoral silos and to be prepared to constantly renew methodological skills and techniques but also to approach new areas of knowledge (e.g. on renewable energy, biodiversity, and post-growth). However, our interviewees noted differences in terms of expectations and attitudes among the students regarding whether they claimed to engage in more ‘radical out-of-the-box thinking’ or rather considered themselves as ‘diplomatic managers’ (Interviewees C, D, F and H). These differences among the students can also be explained, at least partly, by their various academic backgrounds when joining master’s programmes in planning. In other words, integrating ideas about transformative planning in the curriculum implies dealing, for instance, with strong normative and political convictions and hard decisions about who wins or loses (Interviewees E and F). This also relates to the question of whether teachers are supposed to preach to them about becoming activists in this regard (Interviewee A). In this vein, it was articulated that

[t]he notion of the neutral educator is misleading as is the notion of the technical neutral, scientific objective planner. I think we just have to admit where we stand. I think we can’t say, oh, planning is a political thing, but education is not. Yes of course it is. It’s not value-free, because I choose the case studies; I choose which theories to present and which to leave out. (Interviewee C)

Also, some of our respondents shed light on the fact that some students certainly favour straightforward solutions instead of over-problematising issues (Interviewees F and H). In other words, some students may be relieved to hear that some teachers present clear-cut solutions that are seemingly easy to apply instead of debating troublesome implications of one measurement or another for specific people and places, for instance. This impression is also underpinned by different teaching styles and scientific traditions that the different teachers represent (e.g. stemming from engineering or social sciences) (Interviewees B, G and H).

Overall, it seems that educating transformative planners may result in a tight-rope walk, namely to identify the right balance between encouraging critical thinking, with the risk of becoming disenchanted, and encouraging students to become proactive planners by also taking them out of their comfort zones, but not

making them panic to the extent that they may give up. […] But we need to tell them that they are educated for a socially responsible profession. They have to feel this responsibility. I do not have any kind of problem with sharing my position, and I used to outline very clearly that this is my position and there are also others. (Interviewee H)

In this regard we could also identify a consensus among our interviewees regarding how to cope with normativity in teaching. An illustrative statement is the following:

Yeah, I’m very clear about that. […] Planning needs a normative position and thus students also need to develop and be able to explain their normative position, not out of nowhere, but connected to a practical situation and a theoretical reflection. […] I mean, I make it quite visible that I have a normative position, but I find it crucial that I do not tell them what the best normative position is, there are many out there. […]. So, it should be clear to the students that planning is not only putting all the problems on the table, since it cannot work without norm-based convictions at some point in order to say what to do. […] So, the balance is somehow to say okay we are planners, so we need normative ideas to guide our often iterative decision-making processes. However, it is of the greatest importance that no teacher should say this is the only way to go. (Interviewee F)

Discussion and conclusions

In this paper, we have shed light on the question of whether planning education keeps pace with the claim that planning practice inevitably plays a key role in striving for carbon-free cities and regions. Although this is a huge task, which is, to echo Campbell (2006, p. 201), ‘out of the ordinary’ for the planning community in research and practice, the resulting necessities, challenges, but also opportunities cannot neglect to address the need to rethink planning education too.

First, we want to point out that our interview study has clearly revealed the need to consider carefully the different national and local contexts of planning education. This includes acknowledging the prevailing planning cultures, language issues and even institutional settings in which our programmes are embedded against the overall effort to provide a planning education that is attractive to students from all over the world. The challenge is that we educate planners and demand that they should be place-sensitive, able to engage with the locality, and able to provide solutions for the problems at hand (Ratnayake & Butt, 2018). But at the same time, there is a need for an education which is globally oriented and that responds to the generic SDGs as defined by the United Nations.

The literature on transition studies and management as well as the debate around different notions of (urban) transformation clearly show that if the political ambition of carbon-free cities and regions is taken seriously there is a strong need to learn a number of different skills, such as co-creation, system-thinking, communication and community building, to name a few. This also means that there is a clear consensus that planning education should not cherish solely ‘technological fixes’ to combat climate change. Planning programmes need to address both, the opportunities that technological advances (e.g. in terms of digitalisation and electrification) may offer, but also the more process-related implications of planning for carbon-free cities and regions that are often related to dealing with complexity, conflicts and new forms of collaborations.

The latter is reflected in the vast number of governance experiments, often in the form of isolated projects and conducted in multi-disciplinary settings, that have been carried out in recent years. The growing body of literature observing these emerging urban labs or test beds shows new ways of planning and collaboration among different types of actors, and how to facilitate processes around learning and experimenting. These processes thus differ from or even clash with traditional planning projects that are mainly controlled within public agencies (e.g. Berglund-Snodgrass & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2020). These new formats of practising planning and multi-disciplinary collaboration inevitably also imply that the need for expertise may differ too, especially if planning professionals function as initiators and/or facilitators of such experimental forms of governance. However, both our literature review and our interviews have confirmed that a clear understanding of what this means for the expertise of planners, or even for planning education, has not been developed yet. Similarly, the literature reflecting planning education has hardly addressed the implications of considering planners as change agents to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions. Nonetheless, the role of planning, and partly even of planning professionals, is acknowledged, but not debated in-depth concerning what the requirements are and what adjustments need to made, for instance. Hence, it is not surprising that although a number of master’s programmes in planning education include sustainability in their courses, as noted by our interviewees, only a few of them include some components focusing more specifically on the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions.

It is also noteworthy that the concept of transformative planning is not mainstream at the moment, which limits the staffing within planning programmes. Another tension may have to do with the normative stance connected to transformations. This would imply having conversations around the core ideas of planning and the role of normative and ethical values that are inherent in various planning theories that suggest not only what planning is, but also what planning should do (Winkler & Duminy, 2016). Are we supposed to educate planners as ‘objective bureaucrats’ or rather ‘change agents’? This simple question has strong repercussions in terms of normative and ethical considerations and the kind of planners’ roles we need to prepare our students for. The notion of change agents is inevitably more troublesome, as it means going beyond technical rationality that is reinforced by technological advancements, and to engage intensively with critical thinking and the many (social) implications that the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions will imply. Related to this is the often-voiced demand from practitioners to include more practical skills in the curricula (Ozawa & Seltzer, 1999), but, as clearly articulated by our interviewees, dealing with wicked planning problems such as climate change also requires deep learning of underlying norm-based theoretical concepts (such as post-growth, climate justice) that inevitably take students out of their comfort zone. However, on closer inspection, it is also about taking university teachers out of their comfort zone. This relates not only to the question which learning outcomes are best to incorporate in teaching activities on campus or might be better placed within internships or other assignments in which students are directly confronted with planning practice. It also means that educating the next generation of planning professionals to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions also implies a tightrope walk for every university teacher. How to navigate between missionising students and (just) conveying an understanding of normative convictions as well as ethical values underpinning planning theories and planning practice is far from trivial. In our interviews, it was clearly addressed that some teachers feel it is easy to do so and to be at the same time transparent about their view to the students, while for others it is rather a cumbersome experience.

When revising this paper, AESOP’s updated Core Curriculum (AESOP, 2024) was published, which is meant to be generic due to the diversity of planning schools and prevailing local planning cultures across Europe. However, this document demonstrates an increasing awareness of a number of the issues addressed in our paper compared to its forerunner from 1995. Yet based on our analysis, we recognise a strong need to further deepen the discussion, within AESOP and beyond, on how we educate the next generation of planning professionals to promote the transformation towards carbon-free cities and regions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by Formas, the Swedish research council for sustainable development [2021-00050].