Abstract

Planning education is the issue widely discussed during various conferences and seminars, especially ones grouping the representatives of universities offering professional education in this field. But to large extend this discourse is dominated by the realities and specifics of the highly- developed countries, which is also reflected in the structure of the organizations of universities offering these. At the same time planning education in these countries is in many cases limited to socio-economic issues, with no attempt towards dealing with physical planning or urban design. This situation is characteristic to many highly developed countries, like Western Europe or North America. Different situation occur in the post-socialistic countries, where planning profession is traditionally dominated by graduates from the programs in architecture, frequently (and traditionally) treating planning as the “large scale architectural design”. Graduates of these programs have very little knowledge about the social and economic processes, and are not ready to deal with modern planning regulation making processes. At the same time the cities in Central and Eastern Europe (as well as in other post- socialistic countries, including ones in various parts of the world) are in desperate need of modern planning solutions and planners able to deal with their problems. But these involve both urban design and planning as well as development issues, also – emerging from the political and socio-economic specifics of these countries. The paper will include a presentation of the problems and specifics of planning education in the post-socialistic countries as well as key lessons emerging from the analysis of the already implemented new planning curricula. Its conclusions will include the set of recommendations to other institutions in need of curriculum reform and/or development, as many universities are nowadays introducing planning programs. The examples discussed will include the Polish and Russian cases, which were analyzed by the author during his academic career and contacts with various educational institutions in the Central and Easter Europe.

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