What's in a Name Change? City Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois

Abstract

This paper examines change in American planning education in the context of the history of urban plan ning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One crucial fac tor inducing past change was the great increase, following World War II, of planning jobs in public plan ning agencies, a development which enabled planners to end their depen dence on foster parent professions such as landscape architecture. A second major factor was the progres sive divergence of the scientific in terests and societal responsibilities of planners from those of their parent professions. A third factor was the increasing number of planning school alumni interested in establish ing their control over the profes sion's entry standards. While ac knowledging the limits of this single Illinois case, the authors hazard sev eral hypotheses concerning the sources of change in American plan ning education in general.