Salet, Willem2025-03-182025-03-182009https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/275420st Congress of AESOP Liverpool, July 15-18, 2009As the President of AESOP, I am very pleased with the privilege to give a reflective view on the state of our profession, in particular on the uniqueness of planning knowledge and the challenges it faces with respect to social and scientific valorization. Planning studies are deeply rooted in practice. Taking this as a point of departure, I will demonstrate the uniqueness of the planning knowledge, which highly differs from all other disciplines. I will further argue that in the present context of governance, the academic organization of planning is getting more and more interwoven with other disciplines. Finally, I will argue that as a result of all this, planning studies face the challenge of double valorization: both in practices and in the scientific world. I will conclude that the planning community qualifies very well for the first part of this challenge but we should make more progress with the second. For this reason, I see it as a crucial mission to put the scientific valorisation more prominently on the agenda of AESOP.Other