Teachers, traditions, and transitions: Challenges to urban design within Polish planning education

Planning education in Poland has developed within a fragmented institutional setting, creating uncertainty about where design-related competences belong and how they are taught. This paper verifies the place of urban design-focused training within planning programmes by examining how curricula and learning outcomes frame graduates’ capacity to make informed decisions on the built environment. Using a framework that integrates contextual, systemic, and pedagogical challenges, the study combines a quantitative review of 28 university programmes, curriculum analysis, and insights from exploratory expert interviews. The findings show a structural mismatch in the classification of planning as a scientific field, a marginal presence of design-oriented content, and weak alignment between intended learning outcomes and their actual delivery, largely due to acute staffing shortages. The study provides new insight into planning education in Central Europe and helps clarify the evolving role and disciplinary boundaries of design within planning training.