A Transatlantic View of Planning Education and Professional Practice

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison of American planning education and professional practice with the modes of education and practice prevalent in European countries. American planning education, encompassing the world's largest community of planning schools in a single country, can be described as mature, rich, and energetic in production of knowledge, and exhibiting a large variety of formats and approaches that reflect its "bottom-up" evolutionary process. It is high on the generic aspects of planning and relatively low on substantive spatial focus. It is also flexible and open-ended in terms of the jobs graduates take, but is lukewarm on professional organization and professional support. This profile is in many ways different from the profile of planning education and the planning profession in other countries The latter part of the paper presents an initial research agenda for planning theorists who may wish to use the challenging lever of cross- national research for boosting our understand ing of planning.