The State of the Art of Planning and Planning Education in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

Future needs and challenges, the respective contributions of practice and research, and the state of education are constant preoccupations of the planning profession. These issues are regularly canvassed in academic and professional forums. This paper provides an Australasian (Australia and New Zealand) perspective in reporting the findings from an online survey of over 250 planners and planning academics from our part of the world. The survey was inspired by the work of Klaus Kunzmann and Martina Koll-Schretzenmayr who have conducted two major “state of the art” surveys in Europe and Asia since 2014. There are three main foci. The first is how academic and professional planners define the major challenges for the planning profession and the productiveness of their engagement. The second is knowledge exchange across the academic research/practitioner divide in enhancing the profile and contributions of the profession generally through constructive dialogue. The third is an assessment of the present state of and future needs for planning education. This professional self-assessment yields overall positive results amid guardedness and caution. There is common ground with the European and Asian surveys albeit falling short of the same sense of grimness and crisis moving forward.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the consent of Martina KollSchretzenmayr and Klaus Kunzmann in developing our spin-off survey. We also thank Elizabeth Taylor (RMIT) for assisting with the online questionnaire, Raven Cretney (RMIT) with the data analysis, Heather Shearer (Griffith) for analysis and images, as well as two referees for commentaries on the manuscript. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AESOP Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Freestone

Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies from Macquarie University. His authored and edited books include Place and Placelessness Revisited (2016), Exhibitions and the Development of Modern Planning Culture (2014) Urban Nation: Australia's Planning Heritage (2010) and Designing Australia's Cities (2007). He is the co-editor of the latest Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning: The Right to the City, Volume 6 (2017).

Robin Goodman

Robin Goodman is Professor and Dean of the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Melbourne and has broad interests in planning, public policy and housing. She has most recently co-authored Planning Melbourne – Lessons for a Sustainable City (2016).

Paul Burton

Paul Burton is Professor of Urban Management and Planning and Director of the Cities Research Institute at Griffith University, Queensland. He is a member of the National Education Committee of the Planning Institute of Australia, a founding member of Regional Development Australia Gold Coast Inc, and Editorials Editor of Urban Policy and Research. Before moving to Australia in 2007, Paul was Head of the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.