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Are you interested in the boundaries and directions of urban planning science?

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Our summary today works with the article titled The landscape and evolution of urban planning science from 2023 by Milad Haghani, Soheil Sabri, Chris De Gruyter, Ali Ardeshiri, Zahra Shahhoseini, Thomas W. Sanchez, and Michele Acuto, published in the Cities journal. This is a great preparation to our next interviewee in episode 141, Soheil Sabri, where we talk a lot about the urban planning science. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see what urban planning science is. This article presents insights how the science of urban planning has historically transitioned and where it is headed.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Urban planning has so many other names, like town planning, city planning, regional planning, rural planning. Urban planning is also involved in political and technical fields to plan, regulate and manage the economic, social and environmental significances of defined spatial boundaries and the distribution of resources within. The first historical urban planner was Hippodamus, the Greek philosopher in the 5^th century BCE, named to be the father of city planning and the pioneer of urban planning. And even though there is evidence of urban planning throughout history, as a scholarly discipline it only appeared in the 1900s. Conventionally, urban planning has been considered a top-down approach, however, over time urban planning has been focusing on social and environmental issues to help improve quality of life and wellbeing following a sustainability framework.

Urban planning is a multidisciplinary technical profession, and endeavour that aims to create better places and public spaces for people by balancing the built and natural environment. Urban planners address community needs, respect cultural significance and consider sustainable prosperity of urban and regional areas. Theories and conduct have been evolving from a mixture of physical surveys, design, mapping and infrastructure engineering to consider broader social, environmental and economic issues. In the last two to three decades, there seems to be a wider diversification due to political transformations, climate change, rapid urbanisation and technological developments. New paradigms including smart growth, compact city, just city, resilient city, and smart city are some examples. So this study aims to determine the divisions and topics, temporal research activities and major patterns in urban planning science, thus discussing where this scientific field is headed.

The authors found four major clusters: governance and policy, built and natural environment, economics and markets, and housing. The built and natural environment division is relatively young, while the economics and markets and the housing are older. Despite its youth, the built and natural environment is currently the most cited and active in urban planning science. Welfare economics has been a reoccurring theme and seems to be a trending topic. During the 80s and 90s, the focus of urban planning research moved towards regional policy and development, social welfare and urban renaissance. This trend continued in the 2000s and 2010s heading to urban morphology, participatory planning, urban sociology, global cities and political economy. These trends have been derivative and gradual, and this is a unique characteristic of urban planning. It shows characteristics of a fluid research field and interconnectivity of social, economic, political and environmental aspects in urban planning science.

The trajectories towards resilience, smart cities and urban green spaces reflect global concerns about climate change, natural disasters, and the influence of technological developments in smart urban planning and management. Interestingly, some of the emerging technologies have not been reflected yet quite visibly, like the application of Internet of Things or machine learning, artificial intelligence and digital twins. A possible explanation is that these technologies remained in the conceptual levels and there remains a gap on multi-disciplinary publications across digital engineering and urban planning scholars.

Urban planning research has been visibly globalised and is transitioning from country specific case studies and concepts to studies with global implications. Consequently and in parallel, the rise in international collaborations has been very distinct in recent years. During 2010-2021, the strongest link of country collaboration was found between authors of China and the USA. There is a significantly more connectedness between urban planning scholars in the last decade compared to the previous ones.

In education, the authors identified distinct periods – classic, intermediate and contemporary which means that urban planners were educated in different periods of time that have had quite different perspectives and knowledge sources. The field shows paradigm shifts and moves on from topics every few years and probably their education may become outdated. This research shows how often education providers need to update their curricula. Urban planning professional associations and upskilling trainings also need to reflect such evolutionary steps. For example, urban resilience and smart cities are very specific and distinct domains that need a multi-disciplinary training approach to prepare urban planners and policy-makers in addressing climate change issues and leveraging emerging technologies for sustainable, productive and liveable cities.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Urban planning is a multidisciplinary technical profession, and endeavour that aims to create better places and public spaces for people by balancing the built and natural environment.
2. The current trajectories towards resilience, smart cities and urban green spaces reflect global concerns about climate change, natural disasters, and the influence of technological developments in smart urban planning and management.
3. Urban planning science is evolving to help urban challenges, so should its education too: for example. urban resilience and smart cities are very specific and distinct domains that need a multi-disciplinary training approach to prepare urban planners and policy-makers in addressing climate change issues and leveraging emerging technologies for sustainable, productive and liveable cities.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What have you known about urban planning science? What do you think about it now?
2. How can we help urban planning science to gain more weight in urban decision and policy-making?
3. How can you connect more with urban planning science?

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