From Idea to Dissertation or From Practitioner to Researcher
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Date
1999
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AESOP
Abstract
A practitioner of municipality planning lives in a system of hierarchical organisations and are often expected to work in a technical-rational way and give realistic alternatives possible to implement in a narrow future. In the past time planners were respected professionals in the local authority and in the duty for the politicians. But today in the post-modern era it is not that easy to be a planner, the planning processes are questioned and criticised not to be enough flexibel and useful in a new liberal society. In this questioning of the past and in a vacuum before something new, it is understandable that the practitioners ask the researchers how to handle the situation. After 18 years as a planner in urban and regional planning I started for teaching at the newly established planning education at an also recently established small university in Karlskrona, Southern Sweden. During the years of teaching I had profited from my earlier experiences from practice and the new situation gave me motives to reflect over my earlier practice. The question started to grow, what is going to happen with the planning profession in the future, what knowledge and competence are going to be expected from the planners? My questioning got so urgent to me that instead of asking other researchers I started own research studies in which I have combined my interest for planners competence with a focus on sustainability issues in comprehensive planning. Research is a quite different way of thinking than practice. The researcher doesn't accept the ordinary description or explanation to something without scrutinise both earlier knowledge and thinking about a phenomena or questioning the phenomena itself. Research is to study critically, test, develop ideas, theories, perspectives, way of observing and understanding phenomenon.
Description
Book of abstracts : AESOP PhD workshop 1999, Finse, Depertment of Geography Univeristy of Bergen, Norway
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CC-BY