The Cultural Politics of Planning education
Katharine Rankin

This paper brings the analytical contributions of post-colonial theory to bear on the cultural politics of planning education in North America. Urban and regional planning programs train professionals to analyze, plan, and design city-regions, through interdisciplinary training that encompasses the social, economic and environmental dimensions of human habitats. Planning students must typically master a range of "generalist" skills, including quantitative analysis, urban economics, public presentation, report-writing, and interpretation of planning theory. They also typically choose a topical specialization—for example, social planning, economic planning, environmental planning—and a geographic focus to their studies—domestic or "international," i.e., Third World Development.

In this paper I want to examine crucial gaps in planning curricula and recruitment practices that represent two sides of the same coin—an inattention to the cultural and political domination that can reside in the "technical" processes of making urban plans, modernizing cities, and indeed educating a professional class of urban planners. The paper examines, on the one hand, the absence of routine explorations of such issues as culture and politics in relation to the training students receive about the practice of international development. Planning students seeking careers in international development may learn about transportation engineering, or gender training, or waste management systems; but they are rarely offered the theoretical tools to locate planning interventions in relation to the broader political-economic conjuncture or indigenist/subaltern perspectives (post-colonial or otherwise). The paper also considers a paradox that hovers over planning education on the North American front: urban planners must carry out their work in cities with increasing degrees of ethno-cultural diversity, yet the students and professors who populate urban planning programs typically represent culturally homogeneous (and elite) segments of those populations. A "post-colonial" perspective on planning education might advocate instead recruiting the best talent from a wide range of ethno-culturally diverse communities—not merely to ensure the demographic composition of planning programs better reflects urban diversity, but also to enrich planning education substantively by creating an intellectual environment within which a true diversity of opinions about what planning is and should be may thrive. The paper concludes by drawing on "realist" notions of cultural diversity (à la Satya Mohanty) as a foundation for constructing an approach to planning education that challenges, rather than perpetuates, forms of economic and cultural oppression today.