Planning as a field in Brazil and South Africa: some preliminary findings and lessons for planning education
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Urban and Regional Planning education In Brazil and South Africa has developed in different ways both in content and in structure. A simplistic distinction made between urbanismo and town planning by Piccinato (1987) is that “Town planning is Anglo-Saxon, urbanism is Latin”. This assumes that both Brazil and South Africa have, in one form or another, been influenced by their particular spatial, sociohistorical contexts. These observations point to the possibility that a range of different forces or ‘struggles’ have culminated in these different approaches to the ‘field’ of planning and the current state of Planning Curricula. A Bourdieusian theoretical concept of ‘fields’, where fields are seen as arenas in which ‘actors and institutions struggle for something they have in common’ (Edman 2001), provides a useful framework in which to begin to interrogate what different ‘arenas, axis, actors and institutional struggles’ have taken place in order to produce these variations or similarities between Brazilian and South African approaches to planning and planning curricula in what may be considered peculiar circumstances. By extending this idea further the question that may be posed is ‘how, why and in what forms has urban and regional planning education and the bodies or ‘corps’ of people practicing planning been constituted in South Africa and Brazil in the period 1960 to 2012?’ In other words, what are the set of beliefs or rules which have been established as a result of ‘struggles’, what were these ‘struggles’ and what social, political, historical and economic forces framed the field of planning in these two different contexts.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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