1st Edition

From Student to Urban Planner Young Practitioners’ Reflections on Contemporary Ethical Challenges

Edited By Tuna Taşan-Kok, Mark Oranje Copyright 2018
    354 Pages
    by Routledge

    354 Pages
    by Routledge

    For many young planners, the noble intentions with going to planning school seem starkly out of place in the neoliberal worlds they have come to inhabit. For some, the huge gap between the power they thought they would have and what they actually do is not only worrying, but also deeply discouraging. But for some others, practice means finding practical and creative solutions to overcome challenges and complexities.

    How do young planners in different settings respond to seemingly similar situations like these? What do they do – give up, adjust, or fight back? What role did their planning education play, and could it have helped in preparing and assisting them to respond to the world they are encountering?

    In this edited volume, stories of young planners from sixteen countries that engage these questions are presented. The sixteen cases range from settings with older, established planning systems (e.g., USA, the Netherlands, and the UK) to settings where the system is less set (e.g., Brazil), being remodeled (e.g., South Africa and Bosnia Herzegovina), and under stress (e.g., Turkey and Poland). Each chapter explores what might be done differently to prepare young planners for the complexities and challenges of their ‘real worlds’. This book not only points out what is absent, but also offers planning educators an alternative vision.

    The editors and esteemed contributors provide reflections and suggestions as to how this new generation of young planners can be supported to survive in, embrace, and change the world they are encountering, and, in the spirit of planning, endeavor to ‘change it for the better’.

    Preface (Tuna Taşan-Kok & Mark Oranje) Chapter 1. Introduction: Young practitioners’ reflections on contemporary ethical challenges 
(Tuna Taşan-Kok & Mark Oranje) Part 1: Education, Reality, and Ethical Challenges Chapter 2. Mismatch between planning education and practice: Contemporary educational challenges and conflicts confronting young planners
(Tuna Taşan-Kok , Ela Babalik-Sutcliffe & Mark Oranje) Chapter 3. Challenges of planning practice and profession: to what extent young planners are able to intervene? 
(Jef van de Broeck) Part 2: Lost, Oblivious or Boundary Pushing? Responses from Practicing Planners Chapter 4. "A spider in the web" or a "puppet on a string"? Swedish planning students’ reflections on their future professional role (Moa Tunström) Chapter 5. Lost in transition: Fledging planners in Bosnia and Herzegovina 
(Aleksandra Djurasovic) Chapter 6. Good intentions, deep frustrations and upward mobility: Just another young planner’s day in South Africa 
(Mark Oranje, Sanell Venter & Albert Ferreira) Chapter 7. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Young planners mobilizing against the planning of towers in Tel Aviv (Talia Margalit) Chapter 8. Confronted and disappointed? Struggle of Turkish planners against authoritarian state-regulated urban development (Tuna Tasan-Kok & Mehmet Penpecioglu) Chapter 9. In Search of a Place: Young Planners’ Reflections on Planning and Practice in Boston (Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz) Chapter 10. "Things can only get better?" - transitioning from planning student to planner in the England of the 1990s and 2000s (Olivier Sykes) Chapter 11. "The door is now half open": How Work Placement Experiences Better Prepare Planning Graduates for Practice: An Australian Case Study (John Jackson) Chapter 12. Planning for Rights: Bewildered young planners in Brazil (Roberto Rocco) Chapter 13. Facing up to Finnish Planning Pathologies: A Contextual Interpretation of Planner Capabilities and a Call for Change (Jonna Kangasoja & Hanna Mattile) Chapter 14. The self-conception of German planners as pioneers for sustainability transition (Joerg Knieling & Katharina Klindworth) Chapter 15. "I shall survive": Planners’ strategies in the face of the strong asymmetry of illegal powers in Italy (Daniela De Leo) Chapter 16. A new generation of professionals in urban planning – a system full of limitations – the case of Hungary (Zsuzsa Foldi) Chapter 17. Still a planners’ paradise? A new role for young planners in the Netherlands (Willem Korthals Altes & Tuna Tasan-Kok) Chapter 18. Deregulation of the spatial planners’ profession in Poland and the new inconsistent system: What happens next? (Magdalena Zaleczna) Chapter 19. Planning Pedagogy and Practices in Transition: Taiwan’s Young Planners and Their Challenges of Finding Purpose in Planning (Sue-Ching Jou & Shu-Mei Huang) Part 3: Recommendations, Reflections and Conclusions Chapter 20. A quest for a critical debate and new ideas (Louis Albrechts) Chapter 21. Editors’ reflections and conclusions (Tuna Taşan-Kok & Mark Oranje) Afterword: Notes on the critical study of planning Practices (John Forester)

    Biography

    Tuna Taşan-Kok is an urban social geographer and planner, and works as a university Professor in the Department of Human Geography, Urban Planning and International Development, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in social geography and planning from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and a MSc. in regional planning from METU, Ankara, Turkey.

    Mark Oranje is a Professor in the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His key areas of teaching, research, and consulting are planning policy, planning history, regional development, intergovernmental development planning, and the interface between mining and settlement development.