“Planners are Society’s Humanisers”: The Expectations and Motivations of 21st Planning Students

This paper reports the first large-scale survey of planning students that focuses on their motivations for studying planning and their hopes for future practice. It reveals planning students as highly intrinsically motivated with clear desires to achieve change especially in the environmental domain. This appears to represent a shift as compared to earlier work on planners’ motivations, in which public service and issues of social justice predominate. These findings are significant for planning pedagogy in terms of nurturing motivation through curriculum design, and for practice in relation to the implications of this diminished emphasis on public service for planning outcomes.