More than Analytics: Five Approaches to Educating Professionals to Shape Today’s Digital Cities

Abstract

In the last two decades, a variety of digital technologies have proliferated in cities. Urban planning educators must respond to this given local resources, constraints, and options. This commentary reviews curricular innovations being undertaken by planning faculty at five diverse institutions to advance pedagogy beyond analytics. Our contribution is to identify three general approaches to expand teaching on digital technologies: (1) undertake reforms within accredited planning programs, (2) develop new educational offerings, and (3) teach through engaged learning programs. We urge broader curricular innovation in the planning field to ensure the field’s relevance and impact in an increasingly technical future.

Introduction

For too long, engaging deeply with digital technologies has been seen as a luxury within the planning field. Only a few elite programs dedicate scarce resources to technologies, which for many years were not widely adopted in the planning field. Even programs that have been more interested in incorporating digital technology topics into their curriculum may feel a tension between expanding teaching on technology versus other pressing issues like racial justice and climate resilience. We disagree with such zero-sum thinking. Digital technologies are implicated in producing and perpetuating inequalities in a variety of areas, but they can also be part of efforts to expose and redress those harms (e.g., Benjamin 2019; Eubanks 2017). Achieving progress on climate change requires that we critique and curtail over-hyped, resource-intensive solutions like autonomous vehicles (AVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) and invest in proven climate solutions that serve all urban residents. We envision teaching a new generation of planners who are equipped to reshape urban technologies to pursue more sustainable and just futures.

In this commentary, we argue that enhanced teaching of data analytics skills is a necessary but not sufficient step to preparing future planners to shape our increasingly digital cities. While new technologies are primarily invented by scientists and engineers, David and McNutt (2019) and Wilson and Chakraborty (2019) argued that urban planners are uniquely qualified to bridge the gap between technology creation and implementation. Planning professionals in many cities are deeply involved in managing and regulating digital platforms like ridesharing and home-sharing companies, preparing master plans to tackle digital divides (NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, 2020, 2021), running smart city programs, and even working within urban technology startups. Improving basic data and statistical fluency among planners is already a recognized concern (Jurjevich et al. 2018; Maguire 2021). Emerging evidence suggests these roles do leverage core knowledge and skills from the urban planning curriculum, but they also require deeper knowledge of technologies and related topics such as ethics and design that are often missing from our curricula (Lassiter and Epstein 2023). As a sign of these changes, we note that the revised Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) standards, which came into effect in January 2023, added “data analytics and urban technology” to the list of required knowledge and skills and also encourages programs to keep curricula in tune with emerging trends (Planning Accreditation Board 2022).

Keeping pace with advancements in urban technology poses a teaching challenge. The first challenge is the distinction between “data analytics,” primarily a tool- and methods-based subject area, and “urban technology” that is about deploying sensors of varied types for real-time data management and collection. Already, there is a history of planning programs evolving over time alongside changes in technology, analytic methods, and the attendant skills sought in the workforce (Brinkley and Hoch 2021; Edwards and Bates 2011; Friedmann 1996; Greenlee, Edwards, and Anthony 2015). Planning programs are already familiar with data analytics and are capable of expanding their capabilities and sophistication. For example, all planning programs require quantitative methods and most also provide instruction in how to use tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but the nuances of navigating public–private partnerships or the ethical questions arising from passive sensing are novel and rare. New technologies are fast-moving and generally outside the traditional expertise of planning scholars. A recent study on the UK planning context found a considerable digital skills gap within planning schools, despite these schools being within the same universities that house world-leading urban analytic and spatial analysis research units (Batty and Yang 2022).

With many planning programs experiencing stagnant and declining enrollments, technology is one of many areas clamoring for attention. Nonetheless, we believe all programs can take meaningful steps to better equip future planners with the foundational knowledge and skills to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of technology in cities as part of our disciplinary commitment to advance the public interest. This commentary presents short case studies of how five diverse programs are doing this and distills them into three general strategies. These are (1) undertake reforms within planning curricula through modifications to existing courses or the development of new classes or concentrations, (2) develop new educational offerings outside the confines of accredited programs, and (3) teach technology through engaged learning programs. Which option is appropriate for a given planning program depends on many factors, such as the broader university context, the needs of local employers and stakeholders, and the skills and interests of faculty.

This essay is an outgrowth of a conversation initiated at a roundtable at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) 2022 Conference in Toronto, where the commentary coauthors discussed how their teaching was preparing students to engage with digital technologies. In the spirit of sparking further debate and innovation in the field, we present five brief case studies before discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the three approaches.

Case Studies in Educating Professionals to Shape Today’s Digital Cities

This section presents short case studies of how urban planning faculty affiliated with five universities are engaging in curricular innovations related to digital technology and cities. The faculty are involved in the University of Virginia’s (UVA) Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Michigan’s Urban and Regional Planning Program, University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of San Francisco’s (USF) School of Management.

University of Virginia Department of Urban and Environmental Planning

UVA’s Department of Urban and Environmental Planning has developed a set of courses to support students who are interested in how data science can be applied to urban issues through a Planning Methods and Analytics concentration. While the University of Virginia has a School of Data Science (SoDS) offering courses that could be relevant for urban planning students, the overwhelming majority of these courses are closed to students who are not enrolled in SoDS programs, which explains the choice to develop courses within the planning program.

The Planning Methods and Analytics concentration within the Master of Urban and Environmental Planning program at UVA includes courses on community-engaged research methods, collaborative planning and facilitation techniques, and planning from a structural perspective in the local government context. In addition to these courses that lay the foundation for participatory data creation and data-informed advocacy, the concentration features the following courses developed since 2020: Digital Technology for Planning–Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Urban Analytics (in R), and Civic Technology Principles and Practice.

The courses within this concentration emphasize data visualization, analysis, and contextualization because planners must have a basic familiarity with how data are created, used, and interpreted if we are to be competent stewards of the public interest. However, this should not be interpreted as exclusively emphasizing quantitative techniques or epistemologies. While the ability to formulate credible critiques of policy proposals and planning interventions requires an understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of how data and technologies work, effective advocacy demands that planners also cultivate the capacity to contextualize data and technologies and to explain their meanings and implications to others. Planners cannot and should not be computer scientists, but there must be a middle ground where students and practitioners are conversant in the technical aspects so that understanding can inform critical thinking around what should be done and how.

Although it has taken time for students to discover these courses and to understand how these courses can support their educational and career goals, the courses now routinely draw students from outside the planning department including those in public policy and engineering. Students in the Urban Analytics course, in particular, have noted that many job announcements in the planning arena now list data visualization and data science skills among the preferred or required qualifications for applicants.

University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning Program

In response to shifting technologies, the Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of Michigan has made two curricular changes—the introduction of a Graduate Certificate in Urban Informatics in 2017 and a Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology in 2022.

After starting a faculty position in 2013, author Robert Goodspeed began collaborations with faculty in more technical disciplines, such as engineering and information science, who shared an interest in urban research. These collaborations resulted in the Graduate Certificate in Urban Informatics, administered by the planning program but offered through U-M’s Rackham Graduate School. This certificate, which can be completed by any graduate student at the university, involves taking fifteen credits from a list of approved classes in multiple disciplines, which ensures students complete coursework in urban contexts, analytical methods, and programming; an integrative project class; and a new urban informatics course. As a result of this approach, the focus is on expanding analytical skills required to work with big data, as well as expose students to related concepts about technology ethics, design, and use that are not well represented in traditional curricula. Despite the interest in the certificate, the number of students successfully completing it has been limited due to challenges in fitting in the coursework around degree requirements and navigating cross-university enrollment.

However, although training professionals to engage with these trends is useful, there are much broader changes that this does not address. Across the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors, we find demand for technical and policy skills ranging from fundraising to technology policy analysis to launching products—all geared toward complex urban contexts. Therefore, outside the strictures of our accredited programs, our college has created a new undergraduate degree, a BS in Urban Technology, to train individuals to enter into this emerging field. Currently in its third year, the program is expected to grow to about two hundred students. Although the program includes a sequence of coding and technology classes, it is anchored in design studios that ask the students to engage with technology design questions at increasing scales.

University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Within the Department of City and Regional Planning, there are two avenues to engage with digitally enabled cities. The first, developed in 2005, is the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics (MUSA) program. Enrolling approximately twenty-five students per year, MUSA is a one-year degree specializing in the application of predictive analytics to urban spatial problems. Students gain skills in Python and R, modern machine learning methods, interactive visualization, cloud computing, and deep learning. In addition to their quantitative coursework, MUSA students are required to take two “urban content” courses within the department’s Master of City Planning (MCP) program to build domain expertise. Approximately half of MUSA classes are taught by adjuncts and lecturers who are professional data scientists to guarantee that the program’s offerings keep pace with practice. The program is popular, with courses frequently oversubscribed and with lengthy waitlists, and has an excellent job placement rate for new graduates. Given the short duration of the program, though, students do not get deep exposure to planning.

The second avenue for engaging in digitally enabled cities is the MCP program’s Smart Cities concentration, which launched in 2013 and enrolls approximately ten students per year. It was initially designed to bundle MUSA with the MCP core curriculum. More recently, however, the program is working to differentiate MUSA and Smart Cities. The Smart Cities concentration is increasingly focusing on the deployment of technology within cities. Students take a variety of courses that include analytics training (four required quantitative courses) and also courses focused on technology policy development and critical examination of technology in the public realm.

An ongoing question is how to continue to shape Smart Cities to best educate students working on the topical areas relevant to digitally enabled cities. One challenge is that there are administrative barriers to cross-listing courses from other departments, limiting prospective course offerings. Another challenge is that offering MUSA and MCP with a Smart Cities concentration causes some confusion among prospective and newly admitted students. Many students see Smart Cities as primarily or solely an analytics degree. Prospective students tend to lack a broad understanding of the importance of policy and planning in relation to digital technologies in cities. Considering the dominant role that analytics and informatics play in discussions around Smart Cities, the conflation of analytics and Smart Cities is understandable but can lead to student confusion and initial dissatisfaction.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Students engage in digital infrastructure training in several ways at Georgia Tech, both within and outside the School of City and Regional Planning (SCaRP). Outside SCaRP, the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN) launched in 2021 as a public–private partnership to support inclusive innovation around the state of Georgia. PIN is housed within Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, the university’s economic development center, rather than any specific school. Former Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson, in partnership with the private sector and civic groups like the Atlanta Regional Commission and Georgia Chamber of Commerce, founded PIN. Thanks to private sector support and programmatic success, the state has given PIN a permanent line item on the state budget ($1.5 million in FY2022).

Three PIN programs are related to urban technology: Smart Communities Corp, Smart Communities Challenge, and Innovate for All. The Smart Communities Corp internship program connects two students from Georgia universities with a local partner focused on digital infrastructure, innovation, or smart cities project implementation; Smart Communities Challenge funds local initiatives around the state; and Innovate for All supports university researchers. The internship offers students distinct training in applications research or implementation while fostering social networks and information sharing across the state. Author Paige Clayton hosted two interns in summer 2022 for research about innovation activity across Georgia.

School of City and Regional Planning students and faculty engage with PIN through the funding initiatives and internships (in summer 2022, MCRP students held internships). In 2022, the Schools of City and Regional Planning, Industrial Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, and Interactive Computing launched a joint MS in Urban Analytics degree, where students can choose any of these schools as their base degree program. While still focused on analytics, the degree is distinct in how it is bringing non-planning students into planning classes.

As we argue in this commentary, though, broadening the engagement of planners in digital infrastructure requires more than understanding technologies. It requires interaction with citizens to demonstrate how access to digital technologies can improve lives beyond the ability to use streaming services, for example. The Georgia initiative could serve as a model for bringing together researchers, students, public agencies, and private companies toward a better digital future.

University of San Francisco School of Management

The USF, a highly diverse mid-size private Jesuit university in San Francisco, has a cross-sectional approach to urban planning, policy, and public administration on campus where urban technology and planning analytics are functionally spread across the campus. While the more traditional urban planning courses on quantitative analysis and GIS are housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, other planning support courses grounded in data visualization and statistics are offered in the School of Management, where policy and public administration are housed. This structure aligns public and philanthropic leadership and management with private sector business education.

This cross-pollination of curriculum encourages students and faculty to step out of traditional academic conventions and explore more experimentation within courses. For example, the traditional “planning” student might learn quantitative skills through a Business Analytics or Public Budgeting and Finance course. Conversely on the faculty side, an Engineering faculty member might teach a Quantitative Methods course or a faculty member in the Entrepreneurship & Innovation or Public Administration program might teach a Strategic Planning course.

While some campuses make a distinction between planners and computer scientists, the USF approach has been grounded in creating flexible opportunities that could result in planners and computer scientists creating a middle ground—not when they graduate, but in the classroom. As a result, courses like a required Big Data and Technology Policy course in the Master of Public Administration program have been able to experiment with things like implementing blockchain and cryptocurrency technology in global cities and exploring public sector applications of generative artificial intelligence.

While this flexibility has something to do with the flexibility of the curriculum to stretch across departmental boundaries, another key reason relates to faculty department structure. The campus encourages multiple-department appointments for faculty, and some programs have recently gone so far as to rethink (and in some cases eliminate) academic departments. In the case of the School of Management, departments were eliminated in favor of a thematic structure aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This educational reframing structure allows for students to contextualize their work, not in a for-profit or non-profit/philanthropic lens but rather in the global “wicked” problems that planning practice seeks to solve. While this approach may be radical, it provides a much different counterpoint to more traditional planning education. It also presents a potential path forward for small planning programs with fewer resources for creating entirely new degree programs.

Discussion

Our case studies illustrate three general approaches taken by planning programs—or individual planning faculty—to create curricular offerings that address the dynamic landscape of urban technology today.

Within Current Planning Accreditation Board–Accredited Masters Programs

These cases illustrate that there is ample opportunity to deepen engagement with these topics within the curriculum of PAB-accredited urban planning masters programs. Indeed, the PAB requirements state that programs “are encouraged to keep their curriculum in tune with emerging trends in the profession and engaged with contemporary issues” (Planning Accreditation Board 2022). When deepening engagement with urban technology topics, these cases illustrate several ways to do it.

One logical approach builds on the traditional emphasis of data analysis within the planning field, using analytical methods as an entree into broader topics, including big data, data governance, and privacy. Increasingly, data analysis involves the scrutiny of the systems that are being used to create data—whether they are urban sensors, digital platforms, or open data portals—raising questions of data governance and ethics. However, situating the topics through the lens of analysis removes a focus on the creation and development of technological systems themselves. Another approach involves viewing technology through the lens of infrastructure, a traditional topic covered within planning education. This lends itself to analysis of broadband infrastructure, the digital divide, and how digital infrastructures can be more creatively leveraged to address community problems. Finally, in some programs, it may make sense to take a topical approach. New data and technology are permeating various traditional planning subfields, such as transportation and environmental planning.

In addition, we call for growing scrutiny into the PAB standards themselves and ask the question about whether curricular innovations sow the seeds for new substantive requirements that deepen the knowledge of urban technologies for planning practitioners. The minimum requirements outlined by PAB are separated into two categories: (1) general planning knowledge in global context and (2) skills and tools for planning practice. The latter explicitly mentions “data analytics and urban technology,” but how to cultivate those competencies within a core curriculum that is required of all students is an open question that we explore here and aim to elevate for further discussion within the discipline. The understanding of who is a stakeholder when technology and data are involved must be flexible and may include technology vendors, Internet service providers, civic hackers, and other data intermediaries (Sawicki and Craig 1996) in addition to the usual government staff, residents, and developers. Similarly, engagement strategies and planning processes themselves may need to change in response to who is at the table, and these questions form the central focus of this paper—how to prepare planning students for effective practice in a world that is increasingly shaped by technologies and data. A potential way forward would be to integrate appropriate elements of data analytics and urban technology into courses that address the “general planning knowledge in global context” requirement. For example, how do (digital) technologies and data fit within existing narratives of urban history and urban development? What have been the impacts of (digital) technologies and data on efforts to promote justice, equity, and inclusion or the way that we understand and engage with the future?

Through New Educational Offerings

These may be fruitful approaches to evolve the discipline, but planning educators need to think beyond the planning discipline and accredited programs. As we observed here, the changes are wide-ranging in society, and therefore, the cases illustrate another approach—the creation of educational offerings that radically re-envision the types of training tomorrow’s urban leaders may need. Examples from our cases are certificates (U-M), new specializations/concentrations (UVA, UPenn), new graduate degree programs (UPenn, GT), new undergraduate programs (U-M), and related new courses to fill out these programs. These new courses are ways of bringing non-planners into our classes, and the cases have highlighted challenges for each approach, which in turn offers lessons for others.

The new degree programs discussed are not PAB-accredited planning programs, and there are certainly pros and cons to this arrangement. Non-accreditation allows the programs to be nimbler and more responsive to rapidly changing technologies, but, on the other hand, continued innovation in new non-accredited programs may detract from the evolution of the field of planning and lead to siloing. The USF case provides an illustrative example of how rather than siloing, the creation of new cross-disciplinary programs can expand the reach of the planning field.

Urban planners are well suited to advocate for the public interest and for the democratic governance of technology and data. We have established frameworks (e.g., advocacy planning, collaborative planning, equity planning) and a core set of values that align with familiar critiques of the Smart City. However, to fully realize that potential, we need to retool as a profession to develop deeper skills and knowledge of new topics related to technology development, management, policy, and regulation.

Through the Cultivation of Engaged Learning

One final way the planning field can participate in these directions is through the cultivation of engaged learning opportunities, such as is being done at Georgia Tech. Building on the tradition of client-based pedagogy, with its long history in planning, allows students and faculty to gain real-world knowledge in a more responsive and flexible way than would be possible through the development and teaching of traditional coursework. Planners are in a unique place to question the strategic and normative goals of new digital technologies, and more flexible engagements within and outside the classroom can allow the field to shape these developments.

Conclusions

In the last two decades, a variety of digital technologies have proliferated in cities, emerging as a new form of urban infrastructure. As observed by Schweitzer and Afzalan (2017), one major impact these developments have had on planning has been the advent of many new forms of big data available to planning practitioners, which are introducing newer quantitative skills into the discipline (Kontokosta 2021) but also raise important ethical considerations (Acolin and Kim 2022). The challenge that we, and the revised PAB accreditation standards, identify is that most planners are unfamiliar with digital technologies used in cities. This is not to say that planners are not increasingly familiar with data analytics. Instead, we argue that it is time for planning pedagogy to advance beyond analytics. Planning students, as well as students in other fields who take our courses, need to know whether placing microsensors and actuators throughout a city actually serves citizens, how to coordinate data among departments, how to devise service agreements with the private sector, and how to develop programs to engage the public in these questions as well.

There are many pathways for planners to work with digital technologies and many pathways for technologists to engage with the field of planning. Some may be highly technical, but others are related to design, policy, and partnerships. Our aim has been to identify paths forward for other planning schools and departments to move beyond analytics and spark further innovation in the field.