disP - year 2017

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/2288

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Browsing disP - year 2017 by Author "Alterman, Rachelle"

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    A Giant Contribution to Global Planning Education : Klaus Kunzmann and the Founding of AESOP
    (Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2017) Alterman, Rachelle
    The existence of a global academic identity for planning must not be taken for granted. If it weren’t for Klaus Kunzmann, there would have been no AESOP. And if it weren’t for AESOP, today’s global planning education institutions would have not emerged or, at best, have been greatly delayed. The vision that Klaus realized 30 years ago with the founding of AESOP has created a momentum with invaluable benefits not only for planning education, but for the citizen-clients of planning worldwide. Even though I was not representing any European school 1, I sensed that something very significant was in the offing; I therefore travelled to Amsterdam in 1987 to attend AESOP’s inauguration ceremony (and was the only non-European there). I have followed AESOP’s evolution and impact ever since. In this brief note, I would like to share with you what I have observed about AESOP’s contribution to the emergence of planning education globally. Unlike medicine or engineering, for example, planning is not a self-propelling global profession. Medical practitioners are dependent on knowledge transfer about dangers discovered, new medicines, or new technologies. In planning, the gains and losses due to knowledge transfer are more amorphous. In fact, planning has a built-in contradiction between the pull of localization and the push of globalization. On the one hand, planning is locally grounded both in its history and ideology: Historically, the planning profession emerged from local-national initiatives in a geographically fragmented process. Planning ideology seeks to enshrine locally specific “placemaking” as a valued norm. In each country, the planning profession is bounded by its own national and local legal frameworks, and it is embedded in specific socio-cultural and political contexts. The legal and political contexts differ greatly across countries, even when they might seem similar from a distance (Alterman 2017). At the same time, the planning profession cannot continue to serve its clients – the majority of humanity – without global knowledge exchange.