V - disP - The Planning Review - AESOP section

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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.
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    A tribute to Patsy Healey (1940–2024) : Obituary
    (Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2024) Davoudi, Simin
    I write this tribute with a heavy heart as I had never imagined that one day I would write about Patsy Healey in past tense. Her passing away in March 2024, at the age of 84 left planning communities across the world with a deep sense of loss and sadness. But as her commemoration in the AESOP conference in Paris showed, people who know Patsy wish to share their cherished memories of her and celebrate her life and achievements not only as a distinguished scholar but also as a remarkable caring and compassionate person. There is much that I can say about Patsy from my own experience of knowing her for over thirty years as her student, colleague, and friend, but in the interest of brevity, I limit myself to a brief account of her key accolades. After an undergraduate degree in Geography at University College London (UCL), Patsy was trained as a teacher and then a planner, following a Diploma in Town Planning from Regent Street Polytechnic (now University of Westminster). In the 1960s, she worked as a planning officer in the London Borough of Lewisham at a time when, as Patsy often recalled, there was a lot of planning without much clarity about its purpose.
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    AESOP activities are back on track after the pandemic
    (Taylor & Fransis, 2024) Cotella, Giancarlo; Casavola, Donato
    The years of the Covid-19 pandemic have been tough for the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) and its community. The main catalyst of AESOP connectivity – its an- nual congress – was cancelled in 2020 and held remotely in 2021, depriving our members of the much-needed face-to-face interactions that have always contributed to the Association’s ad- vancement and growth. Now, after a slow restart in 2022 and 2023, when people hesitantly attempted to go back to normal, we can now officially say that AESOP and its activities are back on track. The larg- est event in the history of the Association took place in Paris in July, hosting over 1200 dele- gates from 55 different countries. In the wake of this great success, it may be worth summaris- ing the multiple activities of AESOP for inter- ested disP readers, in the hope that more peo- ple will attend and benefit from AESOP events in the future.
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    Creating AESOP
    (Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2017) Healey, Patsy
    Atlanta, Georgia, 1985. We are at the annual conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) in the US, both invited for a special session on developments in planning in Europe. Klaus Kunzmann was already well-known in regional development planning circles. I was only there as a substitute for Mike Batty, who had fallen ill with pneumonia. But both of us felt somewhat alien inside the huge hotel and conference complex, and outside in the centre of the city, where we seemed to be the only people, in our separate explorations, trying to discover the area on foot. It was in this challenging context that we came together. We were both excited by the intellectual energy evident at the ACSP event. Could such an arena be created in Europe, then vigorously building a transnational single market and encouraging professional interconnections? Could this be done not as a reproduction of the ACSP model, but in a distinctive and European way, infused with a deep awareness of the diversity of cultural, economic and political conditions across the continent? We knew that, in Europe, planning systems and practices, and education for these practices, had arisen in several different ways. In several countries, the architectural tradition dominated. In others, an engineering origin was more significant, while in eastern Europe, planning was often strongly linked to urban and regional economics (Rodriguez- Bachiller 1988; Frank 2006). We sought to recognise these different strands, while emphasising the focus on place and spatial relations, on urban and regional dynamics and environmental qualities. Both of us understood the planning field as about the interaction of people and places, and how to enhance place qualities for the benefit of ordinary citizens.
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    Eventful years – a look back at the activities of the Association ofEuropean Schools of Planning (AESOP) over the last two years
    (Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2024) Dillinger, Thomas
    Since 2022, despite global crises such as the COVID pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine, the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) has continued its mission to promote cooperation and exchange in the academic planning community. In recent years, the focus has been on AESOP’s international congresses, PhD workshops, numerous projects and quality assurance programmes. This review provides an insight into the activities of the past two years. Fortunately, AESOP is very active with its member schools and I apologise for not being able to mention all the activities.
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    Revising the AESOP Core Curriculum – for the 21st century
    (Taylor & Francis, 2024) Frank, Andrea I.; Koll-Schretzenmayr, Martina
    In 1995, AESOP issued its ‘Statement on European Planning Education’Footnote1 – with the objective of establishing common principles that would foster high-quality planning education provision across Europe. These common principles were encapsulated in a set of requirements forming a Core Curriculum for planning education. Adopted by the AESOP community, these principles served as the basis for the admission of new AESOP member institutions and to promote quality in planning education. However, as planning is a very dynamic field, planning practice and the profession have changed considerably since 1995. Awareness of issues related to climate change and sustainable development has increased; national and local democracies have evolved; and the digital revolution is profoundly impacting the process and the tools of planning, to mention a few important changes. Furthermore, the Bologna agreement (1999) has changed the academic landscape, offering new possibilities and imposing new constraints on the organisation of planning education. For these reasons, in 2021, AESOP’s ExCo decided to embark on updating the principles eschewed in its Core Curriculum.
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    Sustainable Cities: Addressing the Challenges of Tomorrow
    (Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2016) Giezen, Mendel
    The Sustainable Cities Thematic Group has only recently been established. The motivation for doing so was the fact that the AESOP conference tracks have, in the past, paid limited attention to sustainability, even though it is a key topic in many fields. For instance, at the Prague conference in 2015, there were no tracks directly related to sustainability or even resilience. Closest came the title of track 5: Legal Environment for Effective (Good) Governance and Efficient (Sustainable) Use of Land. Sustainability is here the afterthought to efficiency, while it should be the other way around. This is problematic because it is a crucial topic for planners. It is especially crucial for urban planners because cities are – at the same time – the cause of, the victim of, and the solution to issues such as climate change. As the world becomes ever more urbanized, the city has become the place where the problems of climate change have their greatest economic and social impact. For instance, damage from flooding is exponentially exacerbated by the density of population and economic activity. Every year there are more reports of flooding in both the global north (for example, the UK) and the global south (for example, Bangladesh), while at the same time large conurbations such as Los Angeles and Santiago have ever-worsening drought issues. Cities consume a lot of resources and are responsible for a large amount of CO2 emissions. Yet this also means that cities are crucial places to focus on when looking for sustainable development, and urban planning plays a big role in addressing these issues. Therefore, sustainable cities should also be a key focus of planning research and for this reason I started the AESOP Sustainable Cities Thematic Group. Hopefully, over the next few years, we can grow further and become a prominent group within the planning community.