cover image transactions journal

Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning is an international, bi-annual, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, produced and owned by the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). It is free of charge to submit a paper and to publish in the Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning. Accepted papers are accessible online, to everyone, for free. All papers are subject to a double-blind peer-review process.

Published: 01-12-2021

Preface

  • Olivier Sykes

    This issue (5.2) of Transactions of AESOP brings together a selection of papers which address current themes and issues in planning education. Two of the papers reflect on the experience of teaching modules submitted to recent rounds of the AESOP Excellence in Teaching Award (ETA), one reports on an experience of internationalisation in planning education, and one is an invited paper by Andrea Frank the present Chair of the AESOP ETA Committee. They all provide original and insightful contributions addressing key themes in contemporary planning education including, the impacts of the...

Articles

  • Predicting the future is a difficult and inexact business and, generally, humans are more prone to focus on immediate problems and short-term problem-solving rather than long-range planning. In fact, long-range forecasts are tricky and often rendered wrong due to catalytic events. The dramatic changes in teaching, learning, and conducting research that have seemingly catapulted Higher Education (HE) institutions into a new modus operandi over the past 24 months are a case in point. Who would have predicted that higher education would be conducted by a great many institutions almost...

  • In 2012, an international planning studio was organized by the Urban Planning Institute of Grenoble (France) at Sfax (Tunisia). What could have been a one-off project evolved into a long-term cooperation between French and Tunisian partners. The international cooperation in urbanism studio is now the focus of the teaching approach in both years of the Urbanism and International Cooperation master’s programme. This paper firstly considers the theoretical and practical contexts in which these studios developed. It then goes on to explore the planning concepts on which they are built. The...

  • Understanding the relationships between a development and its wider setting is not new to planning. This often delicate balance has been contemplated by planners since well before the ground-breaking European Landscape Convention emerged in 2000. Nevertheless, and in the sustainable management of change, the ELC and its interpretations in domestic laws serve as conscious reminders of landscape as being more value-laden and complex than mere scenery. They support arguments for why meaningful engagement must and should be done - arguments that are most compelling during the education of...

  • Increasingly internationalised student cohorts within planning schools offer opportunities to enhance existent student learning, but may also present potential issues, such as language difficulties, cultural disorientation, and the need to assimilate learning styles, internationalise curricula, and varying pedagogic teaching styles, all of which can impact staffing and costs. In 2016 the Department of Planning and Geography at the University of Liverpool obtained a Learning & Teaching (T&L) Award to develop projects examining the potential for a more meaningful learning...