Knowledge And Power:The Legacy Of Educating Professional Planners

In the last 20 years, urban planning education has shifted its focus from technical knowledge to managing complex and uncertain issues. This change is the result of significant social and practical transformations that have been reflected in the discussions on sustainable development and ecological transitions. As a result, we are witnessing profound changes reflected in the role and identity of planners as urban<br/>“scientists”. This paper delves into how planning practices depict the changes that have occurred, starting from the “legacy” of inquirying the relationship between knowledge and power within the reflective and deliberative planning traditions. Through three brief episodes and in conversation with professional planners situated in present-day planning, this paper explores the contemporary signification of urban<br/>sustainability. Planning professional identities are re-negotiated in various forms and dynamics of knowledge/s and power/s in their practice, single-loop learning processes and changes in their routines, mapping out their influences, and practical judgments involved. Urban planning and policy have become increasingly complex, beyond issues such as “who wins” and “who loses.” Reflexivity is becoming the situational condition of planning in contemporary times, questioning the relationship between knowledge and power, reconfiguring ways of knowing (creating signs, ideas, minds, and selves) and power to enact (experimenting, modelling, testing, making). These dynamics are reinvigorating reflection on the necessary skills and competencies required to educate future planners, to develop the ability to imagine, act, and reflect on a sustainable urban future and its contradictions.