Towards New Urban Agenda: A Radical Reorientation of Urban Planning Education in India

Abstract

An urbanizing country such as India has its own development challenges given the conditions of dystopias and discontent in the urban areas. In addition, three global agendas, namely the New Urban Agenda, Sustainable Development Goals and the Nationally Determined Contributions towards climate change mitigation also demand actions in the cities. The traditional urban planning approach, based on master/development planning, and stemming from it, urban planning education, is highly technocratic and unable to deal with the reality of development challenges. In addition, urban planning education in India suffers from over-regulation and standardization, which leaves educational institutions devoid of innovation. Thus, for urban planning education to be relevant in India there is a need to revise and broaden the scope of the urban planning profession, non-standardize its contents, pay attention to substantive aspects including issues of equity and sustainability, have a future-facing approach towards dealing with climate change and rethink its pedagogic methods. However, for these changes to occur, urban planning educational institutes must take the lead and initiate radical reforms in country’s higher education regulatory system.

Keywords

Urban planning education India reforms global agendas

Introduction

The three important global agendas since 2015, that is, the New Urban Agenda (NUA) of Habitat III in 2016, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations in 2015 and the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) post-Paris Agreement of 2015, provide an opportunity to rethink urban planning and development (Valencia et al., 2019). However, the relationships between these three agendas in respect to urban planning are not linear; there are synergies and conflicts among them (Mahadevia, 2019; Valencia et al., 2019), depending on how they are localized at the city level and within local political economies. The planning links between the three agendas, and their interrelationships are particularly important for cities of the global South which are expected to experience rapid urbanization in the coming decades (Watson, 2016).

Certainly, the NUA is about cities; whilst SDG 11 is also about making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The NUA’s forward lays out a very wide definition of ‘planning’ that includes strategic, spatial and sectoral planning efforts (United Nation, 2017, iv). It also mentions commitments to integrate the SDGs and the Paris Agreement of 2015 within the action agenda. However, the NUA does not clearly states the SDGs as a framework of its monitoring, which some urbanists suggest should have been done (Valencia et al., 2019). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th assessment report of the Working Group (WG) II (Chapter 8, Revi et al., 2014) and WG III (Chapter 12, Seto et al., 2014) lay emphasis on spatial planning. The WG III emphasizes aligning policy instruments to spatial planning strategies, for example, integrating land-use and transportation planning or infrastructure and land use planning. Once again, the term ‘planning’ here is used in multiple ways; referring to land use planning and other sectoral plans. The NUA and SDGs are considered ambitious, comprehensive and socially progressive (Watson, 2016; Zinkernagel et al., 2018), with the possibility of bringing in equity and justice within urban planning and development (Sietchiping et al., 2016). However, for these global agendas to translate to local actions, their aims must be mainstreamed within urban planning (in content and in processes) and its education.

India, the second-largest country (by population) in the world, is likely to experience urbanization for next half a century given its low level of urbanization (31.7% in 2011) (Census of India, 2011). Thus, the urban transition in India should start meeting the commitments of the NUA, the SDGs and NDCs alongside each other. The urban development trajectory in India should be characterized by the notions of sustainability (social, environmental and economic) and equity, which should, in turn, be reflected in urban planning systems. Existing urban development approaches, such as through physical planning or implementing infrastructure projects, are often characterized by inertia in planning systems and vested interests (Watson, 2016), and conflict with the SDGs and aims for equitable development (as enshrined in the NUA), due to an overemphasis on economic growth.

The questions we ask in this study are (a) do current approaches and methods in urban planning education in India rise-up to meet the new challenges of urban development? And vice-versa, (b) does urban planning education contribute to new ideas about how urban planning needs to happen? These questions are probed through a desk-based review of curriculums of three long-established postgraduate urban planning programmes of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi (SPAD) (of year 2016–17); Guru Ram Dass School of Planning, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar (henceforth GRD-GNDU) (of year 2016–17); Faculty of Planning, CEPT University, Ahmedabad (henceforth FP-CEPT) (of year 2016–17) and discussions/opinions of the educators and practitioners in the field of urban planning in India.

The opinions of the educators and practitioners were sought through seminar¹/workshop² mode, where we presented facts about the urban challenges in India, the history of urban planning and its education in the global context and the contents of urban planning education as summarized from the desk-based review of the curricula. Resource constraints limited us from going into the pedagogical details of the courses listed in these three school’s curricula. The discussions/opinions were sought in a format of one-to-one open-ended discussions with three academics, two practitioners and two urban researchers. Lastly, the study also draws on the significant personal experience of the first author, who has taught in the urban planning programme for 25 years in one of the school’s reviewed here, holding the position of dean of this programme for three and a half years, during which she undertook restructuring of the programme. Needless to say, the purpose of the curriculum review and the workshops is to make urban planning education more meaningful for future planners in addressing the three global agendas to create sustainable and inclusive cities.

The remainder of this study is structured as follows: a brief outline of urban planning efforts in India and the continuing challenges, dystopias and discontents in spite of urban planning is presented in the second section. This section highlights the disconnect between urban planning as it is practiced and urban development issues. The third section establishes the underlying issues of over-regulation and centralized decision-making in professional and higher education in India. Drawing from literature, desk-based curriculum assessments and opinions of planning educators and practitioners, the fourth section critically assesses the contents of the curriculum and identifies four issues concerning urban planning education in Indian planning schools. The fifth section argues for radical changes in the practice and education of urban planning so as to remain relevant in the context of current challenges to do with sustainability, low-carbon and equitable urbanization.

The Urban Dystopias, Discontents and Disconnected Urban Planning

Early urban planning in India had British roots, that is: (a) Patrick Geddes’s diagnostic surveys, conservative surgery and integrated planning; (b) application of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City principles in the development of the colonial capital, New Delhi by Edward Lutyens; (c) construction of cantonments or civil lines (separate residential colonies outside cities for military and/or British rulers); (d) enactment of the Town Planning Acts in Bombay (Mumbai), in 1915, and Madras (Chennai), in 1920, on similar lines of the British Housing and Town Planning Act 1909 and (e) establishing of Improvement Trusts in many cities. Throughout the British period, the involvement of Indians in town planning remained lamentably poor (Kalia, 1987).

After Independence, attention shifted to planning and constructing towns for newly arrived refugees as an emergency response (Sarin, 1982). The emphasis on nation-building in the modernist mould (scientific thinking, rationality and democracy) and the political philosophy of socialism led to development through industrialization. This was accompanied by urbanization and hence the building of new capital cities (Bhubaneswar and Chandigarh) and industrial towns (Jamshedpur). International experts that were engaged in these projects, such as Le Corbusier (for designing Chandigarh) and Otto Königsberger (for Bhubaneshwar and Salt Lake City), brought in the European influence of town planning. This was rooted within what Taylor (1998) calls the ‘utopian approach’ to town planning, and carried ‘anti-urbanism’ aspects as represented in the city visions of ‘Garden City’ (Ebenezer Howard), ‘Radiant City’ (Le Corbusier), etc. Chandigarh became the model of town planning in the country with the urban planning priority shifting from refugee towns to a new symbol of modern India (Kalia, 1987; Sarin, 1982). This was followed by the approach called ‘rational panning’ or ‘comprehensive planning’, as part of which the Institute of Town Planners, India (ITPI), a professional town planning institute similar to the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) in Britain, was established in 1951. The developments discussed above gave full control to the ‘master plan’ to allocate lands to achieve urban utopias. The first such master plan was prepared for Delhi, which then became a model that was later followed in the rest of the country.

The transposition of European design and physical planning concepts onto the Indian context, in the absence of transformation within the country’s social structure, created a complete separation of physical planning and design from the economic and social issues on the ground (Kalia, 1987; Sarin, 1982). Thus, India’s experiments in modernism and urban development accentuated the gap between what these plans professed and what they achieved (Kalia, 2004). By default, urban planning, as a profession, restricted itself to master planning, first for a city and subsequently for a wider metropolitan region with the city as its nucleus. Thus, post-Independence urban planning has been characterized by the preparation of master/development plans which fell short of responding to local needs and priorities, as well as complex realities of a predominantly poor, newly independent, post-colonial country (Batra, 2009). The high population growth in Indian cities invariably outstripped even the most perspicacious planner’s vision for it; Indian planners have consistently underestimated infrastructure and service needs, thereby failing to ‘future-proof’ against ‘unforeseen growth’ which results in the splintering of cities (Roy, 2009). The master/development plans assumed public land ownership as in the case of Delhi, but in the rest of the countries, urban land was largely privately owned, making master plan non-implementable. Thus, urban planning remained confined to preparation of physical plans, which were made statutory through state-level legislations, and remained only regulatory with adverse fall outs on two contradictory aspects: the urban poor and the land markets.

Other than the master/development plans, collateral policies and programmes were being framed and implemented through projects. A plethora of programmes which essentially fund project-based local interventions have been framed with an increasingly market-based approach (Batra, 2009; Shaw, 1996). Much talked about recent programmes, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) (2005–2014), Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (2014 onwards), Smart Cities (2014 onwards), Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (2014 onwards) and Urban and Green Mobility provide partial capital expenses for infrastructure development, but may not necessarily conform to the city’s master/development plan. Thus, while urban development became projectized, master/development plans remained politically naïve and lacking in serious analysis—they were more like a pretty colouring of maps by planners and remained merely wishful thinking due to the control exerted over these plans by architects and engineers who were disconnected from the social turmoil brewing in cities (Sanyal, 2008).

Residents of informal settlements continuously struggle for access to water supply and are under the perpetual threat of violence from non-state actors who provide these services (Desai, 2018; Desai & Sanghvi, 2017). Any intervention(s) by the planning authority to legalize informal housing usually results in evictions. Urban planning leads to exclusions through multiple ways: (a) informal housing constructed on public lands and those not conforming to the city’s proposed master/development plan are classified as ‘illegal’ and marked for eviction (Ramanathan, 2006); and (b) the state does not have the discretionary powers to legalize all types of informal developments, particularly the ones on the private lands. The master/development plans do not acknowledge such developments, and the plans are prepared as if the lands were vacant. Thus, urban planning and development projects also create dispossessions (Burte & Kamath, 2017).

In reality, the exclusive nature of urban planning and fragmented urban development projects have resulted in multiple and simultaneous urban challenges at a low urbanization level. About 16.9%³ current urban population is living in slums, 18.8 million (23.8% of the total) urban households in 2012 lived in houses that have to be replaced due to either congestion or dilapidation (Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, 2012), the coverage of (tapped) water supply and toilets has reached 75% and 81% urban households, respectively (Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, 2016, 19). Most Indian cities, barring a few largest ones, lag in public transport inducing low mobility. Unplanned urbanization (unauthorized construction/encroachments) on ecologically sensitive areas such as flood plains, wet lands and natural water bodies, alongside the ongoing impacts of the climate crisis, has caused flood havocs—paralyzing cities and causing immense physical damage. Indian cities are also experiencing higher temperatures and urban heat island impacts. The current urban planning process does not mainstream the climate concerns which therefore necessitates the search for alternate approaches (Pathak et al., 2015)

The discontentment resulting from deprivations in basic services, the selective application of planning laws and mechanisms, unequal city geographies and above all, violence by the state legitimized in the name of urban planning has seen periodic street protests (see Mahadevia et al., 2017, for Guwahati; Bhide, 2013, 2020, for Mumbai). This has spilled into counter-violence and webs of violence (Mahadevia et al., 2017, for Guwahati). For example, in the Basic Services for Urban Poor sites (of the JNNURM) in Ahmedabad, people have protested and vandalized local government offices over the non-supply of water (Desai, 2018; Desai & Sanghvi, 2017). Ironically, as Desai et al. (2020) argue, urban planning itself has become a peg around which urban protests have been organized. The master/development plans are now being questioned by citizens’ groups in some large cities such as Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, etc. (Indorewala, 2015, for Mumbai; Kumar, 2018 for Bengaluru; Verma & Gita, 2003, for Delhi). Urban planning, therefore, does not remain as a neutral technocratic exercise, but has become fraught with protests and litigations in Indian cities.

Amidst the dystopic reality and discontent spilling on to the streets, there is a reaffirmation of the need for planned interventions domestically (Aranya & Vaidya, 2016; McKinsey Global Institute, 2010) as well as internationally. The real question then, is what could be defined as urban planning that has intention and ability to address the contemporary Indian reality? Some scholars suggest: (a) while continuing with the traditional approach of planning through master planning, adding new competencies such as project planning and management, participatory planning, etc., in the planning curriculum can expand the scope of planner’s interventions (Aranya & Vaidya, 2016); and (b) giving up the regulatory role and allowing markets to take decisions while the government plays the role of facilitator in a neo-liberal turn (McKinsey Global Institute, 2010). As one panellist at the CEPT workshop (2017) mentioned:

Whether it is more of planning or less of planning, like less government and more governance…. Whether we go to the path of doing more and more of planning or whether we sit back and do less of planning and allow things to happen on their own?

Such questions have led to confusion in urban planning education, which we will explore in the next two sections.

Urban Planning Education: Over-regulated and Standardized

There is a six-and-a-half-decade history of urban planning programmes in India, firstly at post-graduate and then at the undergraduate levels. The first two planning schools established in India were SPAD (1955), followed by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (1956). Then came the School of Planning at the then Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT, now a university) in 1972. By 2017, there were 26 planning schools in India (Institute of Town Planners of India, 2017), operating under both public and private sectors, with a majority being directly under the national government’s Ministry of Human Resource Development or the various state governments. The early intake of students into the postgraduate programmes was confined to architecture, civil engineering graduates and geography postgraduates, which further expanded to include those from the fields of sociology and economics. This is nearly the same trajectory as followed in Britain many decades earlier (Taylor, 1998). In the academic year 1989–1990, with persuasion from the ITPI, SPAD started a four-year undergraduate programme in planning called Bachelor’s in Planning (BPlan). Many other planning schools/departments started BPlan programmes, and by 2018 some discontinued the same.⁴ In due course, specializations such as environmental planning, housing, regional planning, transportation planning, infrastructure, etc., have been added in a few planning schools/departments.

The urban planning education’s curriculum is set by a national-level regulatory body, namely the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), with assistance from the ITPI— a non-statutory membership-based professional body. There is no national-level accrediting authority for urban planning education; yet, the education institutes, if part of any university (public, private or deemed to be) required approval of their urban planning programme title from the AICTE.⁵ This itself, suggested that urban planning is considered to be a technical programme. In 2016, the AICTE constituted Board of Town and Country Planning, consisting of a few representatives of urban planning schools, state governments, a nominee of the ITPI and chaired by the then director of SPAD, to streamline the urban planning curricula across the country.⁶ This exercise largely adopted the urban planning curriculum developed by the AICTE (2012).

The AICTE curriculum has expanded to include courses that have emerged from the realization that graduating students could be absorbed even in organizations implementing the national-level and state-level projects on urban development. Surprisingly, despite private sector participation in urban development, the courses that could support this view, namely, courses in economics and finance, have not taken prominence in the AICTE curricula. Table 1 gives a list of courses in the AICTE’s postgraduate curriculum and their comparison with those offered in the urban planning programmes in the three institutions.

A necessary clarification: just before starting this research, FP-CEPT was offering independent degree in urban and regional planning, transportation planning, environmental planning, housing, and infrastructure planning. These individual degrees were done away with and replaced with one single degree ‘Masters in Urban and Regional Planning’, along with offering students an option of majoring in any one of the former five streams, namely urban and regional planning, transportation planning, environmental planning, housing and infrastructure planning⁷.

For analysis purpose, the courses listed in Table 1 are divided into two broad categories, ones that are in the AICTE list and ones that are not. We have also classified them as core and elective. Table 1 shows that the FP-CEPT course list significantly diverges, while that of the SPAD and GRD-GNDU are in total sync with the prescribed list of AICTE courses. Nearly all the courses in the AICTE list, that are classified as core, are being offered by SPAD and GRD-GNDU. This is a similar case with the courses mentioned as electives, which have been picked up by SPAD and GRD-GNDU. FP-CEPT has much longer list of elective courses. During the tenure of the first author as dean, FP-CEPT had obtained ITPI’s approval for this new choice-based system, which was necessary for the FP-CEPT students to be qualified to apply for government jobs. FP-CEPT was offering many of the courses listed as core in the AICTE curriculum, including the list of studios.

Table 1.

Comparing Postgraduate Curricula of AICTE and Selected Planning Schools

AICTE Model Curriculum (2012)	Schools Offering^a	Nature of Course^b
Courses imparting knowledge
Planning history and theory	SPAD; GRD-GNDU—as principles of planning; FP-CEPT (separate courses on planning theory and history of urban transformation)	Core
Socio-economic basis for planning	SPAD; FP-CEPT—separate courses of economics and understanding Indian society	Core
Infrastructure and transport planning	SPAD; GRD-GNDU—transportation planning and planning for utilities and services as separate courses	Core in SPAD and GRD-GNDU; elective in FP-CEPT
Housing and environmental planning	SPAD; GRD-GNDU—housing and environmental planning as separate courses	Core in SPAD and GRD-GNDU; elective in FP-CEPT
City and metropolitan planning	SPAD; GRD-GNDU	Core
Urban development and management	SPAD	Core
Urban governance	All three	Core in AICTE and SPAD; elective in GRD-GNDU and FP-CEPT
Project planning and management	All three	Core in SPAD and GRD-GNDU; elective in FP-CEPT
Professional practice	SPAD; GRD-GNDU	Core
Legal issues and professional practice	SPAD; GRD-GNDU—professional practice and legislation are separate courses; FP-CEPT —urban land use planning and legislations and built-form regulations	Core
Politics and planning	SPAD	Elective
Planning for tourism	GRD-GNDU	Elective
Environment, development and disaster management	All three	Elective
Energy, climate change and urban development	SPAD; GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT as single or multiple courses	Elective
Inclusive urban planning	SPAD as inclusive cities	Elective
Courses imparting Skills
Planning techniques	SPAD; GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT—as quantitative and analytical tools	Core in all
Geo-informatics—I and II	SPAD—as urban information system and spatial analysis; GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT	Core in AICTE, but elective in all three
Studios
Area appreciation	SPAD	Core
Site planning	SPAD; GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT—as area planning studio	Core
Statutory development plan	SPAD; GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT—as a composite studio wherein all majors work in same city with purpose of cross-major interactions and planning decisions	Core
Training and thesis
Mandatory training	SPAD; GRD-GNDU	Core
Thesis	All three	Core
Courses not in AICTE Model Curriculum (2012)
Research methods	SPAD—as research methods in planning; FP-CEPT	Core
Urban land economics	GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT	Core
Sustainable planning and development	SPAD	Core
Urban finance	SPAD—as development finance; FP-CEPT	Core
Urban development policies	SPAD; GRD-GNDU	Core
Detailed project report of urban project	GRD-GNDU; FP-CEPT	Core
Community planning and development	All three	Elective
Land use planning and transport	SPAD; FP-CEPT	Elective
Urban and regional economics	FP-CEPT	Elective
Communication and public engagement	FP-CEPT	Elective
Negotiation and consensus building	FP-CEPT	Elective

Source: The authors.

Notes: AICTE: All India Council for Technical Education; FP-CEPT: Faculty of Planning, CEPT University; GRD-GNDU: Guru Ram Dass School of Planning, Guru Nanak Dev University; SPAD: School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.

^aThe courses of only Urban and Regional Planning major are listed here.

^bThis table does not list all the electives.

The courses that would deal with the global agendas of climate change, sustainable development and equity have been introduced as individual elective courses without changing the technocratic curriculum structure of the AICTE. FP-CEPT offered two courses in the socio-economic realm, which could sensitize students about the Indian reality, while GRD-GNDU is offering none. FP-CEPT has a long list of core courses that are not in the AICTE list.

The centralized curriculum of the AICTE has aimed to prepare technocratic and expert, top-down planners for preparing different physical plans and to some extent project reports. The programme defines a standardized professional, one who can prepare a physical plan (comprehensive plan, the master plan). By these parameters, the planning curriculum is largely unsuitable for the planning practice required to address the challenges and dystopias stated earlier.

Some of the recent programmes in the past decade or so decided to put aside the baggage that comes with the term ‘planning’ and call it ‘urban practice’—as the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru does—or ‘urban studies’ which lays emphasis on the politics and governance of cities/urban areas—as the School of Habitat Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Studies, Mumbai does. The emphasis on standardized curricula has now divided the planning programmes into two vertical blocks, one that considers planning as it has historically evolved with a few smatterings of new courses; whereas, the second one is eclectic, each evolving their own philosophy of urban development and accordingly developing the courses. The need to allow flexibility in planning curriculum is accepted. A researcher from National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) suggested (in CEPT workshop, 2017):

Planning curricula should be standardized only to the extent [that] the core competencies get taught.

The Issues in Contents of Planning Education

Besides over-regulation and the lack of flexibility, the issues to be considered for making urban planning education relevant for addressing contemporary concerns and the global agendas in urban India are (a) relevance of the profession itself in its practice and education; (b) training in planning procedures; (c) substantive aspects of planning and their contemporariness and (d) pedagogy.

Relevance of Planning: Its Practice and Education

A common concern heard in the ‘Urban Planning Conundrum in India’ seminars at SPAD and CEPT Ahmedabad and in one-to-one interviews was related to lack of respect for the profession.

It is very pathetic condition. They [government departments] were not recruiting Town Planners and the Chief Town Planner, their positions were taken up by the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officers…. The town planners are not preparing Master Plans, but busy taking day-to-day approvals from the government. (in a discussion with the Official, TCPO, in March 2017)

These statements indicate a lack of seriousness about urban planning (referred as master plan by the interviewee) among the government departments at the state and national level. Additionally, a criticism of the profession lacking in relevance was also raised, pointing to how master plans are unable to deal with contemporary disasters and their management.

Planning schools should expose students to these different things, for example, disaster management. Chennai floods were caused because of land use planning mismanagement. Same thing is happening in Delhi. And who is violating them? It is the government, not the people. All buildings in Yamuna Plains, Delhi Secretariat, Akshardham, Commonwealth Games are built on land reclaimed by government. (in a discussion with the Official, TCPO, held in March 2017)

There was also a common anguish that vested interests drove planning decisions, as opposed to the designs of planners.

A town-planner would not build anything over a water body or replace recreational use by industrial use … [in one city, but] there are everyday meetings about changing the land uses, [from] recreational to industrial, primary school to national political party office, and so on. (in a discussion with the Official, TCPO, held in March 2017)

The lack of relevance for the profession also reflects on the absorption of graduates in the market. On one hand, as stated above, regulatory systems place restrictions on who gets admitted into planning schools based on the background of students. However, following this, even trained planners find difficulty in securing appropriate employment, as the skills taught in the planning education programmes do not meet the market requirements. Some of the requisite skills are communication, policy analysis, negotiations, finance, governance, etc., which are taught in only some of the programmes (Table 1), further adding to the irrelevance of this professional education. Planning graduates instead, pick up these skills when in employment and not necessarily during their educational programme.

when I look back, I realize what I have done is not what I learnt. (Former Director of NIUA and SPAD at CEPT workshop)

A planner is also the communicator—when [one] goes out in the market, it is the ability of a planner to communicate to the larger public the plans … and, how [one] negotiates—these skills are very important for a planner and must be incorporated in educational thinking. (in a discussion with the Senior Researcher, NIUA, held in March 2017)

International literature on urban planning education has talked about a diversified conceptualization of planning practice, such as policy planning, advocacy planning, community planning, legal planning, etc. (Fainstein, 2000; Fischer, 2009; Forester, 1999; Friedmann, 2011).⁸ If this were to happen, urban planning education could not only train students for preparing master, regional and local plans or projects and activities for the state, but also these other forms of planning.

Training in Planning Process

Faludi (1973) has differentiated between ‘substantive’ planning, which is about the objects, that is, contents of and ‘procedural’ planning, which is about the process or procedures in planning. Faludi (1973) also called ‘substantive’ theories as ‘theories in planning’ and ‘procedural’ theories as ‘theories of planning’. Yet, the curricula of AICTE and the three planning schools do not indicate a theoretical level addressal of processes of planning through courses such as political economy of planning, participatory planning, negotiations and consensus-building (except FP-CEPT, that too as elective), etc. The model AICTE curriculum mentions a course on politics of planning, while SPAD has a course on urban development policies.

Direct engagement with the planning process during the two years of postgraduate programme is made possible through a short internship squeezed in the summer break of four–six weeks between the two years, but not in FP-CEPT. This period is generally used by students to scout for employment upon graduation and is mostly undertaken in private consulting firms engaged in either the routine physical planning or housing/infrastructure projects. Planning schools in India do not engage students in live projects.

Substantive Aspects of Planning

Substantive knowledge would deal with the theoretical underpinnings of interventions in the urban space (economics, politics and society), legal knowledge and value systems (ethics, the notion of justice and philosophy) (taking from Friedmann, 1996). Courses related to these theoretical underpinnings are absent, except for a course on the socio-economic basis of planning. Courses related to development theories, gender and development, environment and development, cities and people, poverty and inequality, informal city, etc., should at least be available as electives, which the AICTE curriculum does not mention. A course on ethics, values and justice, which could have provided clarity on the repercussions of planners’ actions and would have helped assess proposals from the points of view of the marginal and excluded populations of a city, is also missing. Questions such as for whom to plan, what to plan and who benefits from plans—all of which lead to critical thinking—are absent from the model curriculum. The question of whose rationality in rational planning approach (Sanyal, 2008) is never formally introduced in the curriculum.

On the skills front, courses related to planning techniques are a part of the AICTE curriculum, dealing with physical planning skills such as Geographic Information System (GIS), existing land use surveys and statistics. Qualitative and participatory methods are not included even as electives. The other essential skills of negotiation, deliberation, consensus building, communication, role playing and practical judgement are not mentioned in the curriculum. All three institutions studied in this study had a course on research methods in the semester before the thesis/dissertation, in order to train students for undertaking independent research, for pursuing a research career or for evidence-based planning. In other words, even the skills imparted are for those who would work largely in the government and private sector, especially on the preparation of physical plans and project reports, without dealing with communities, stakeholders, clients, etc.

Two big areas missing in the courses’ list are those dealing with the notion of ‘inequality’ and ‘inclusiveness’—which are an integral part of the SDGs, the NUA and climate change adaptation and mitigation. The AICTE curriculum has listed courses such as ‘inclusive planning’, and ones dealing with disaster and climate change, but only as electives. On the theory side, these should have been core courses. More importantly, these should form part of the three studios that are offered. As mentioned, we did not get into the detailed contents and delivery of the studios.

Another important aspect to do with a lack of sensitivity and considerations in decision-making, thus missing out on the ‘real’ urban India, was raised in the workshops. Some reflections from the CEPT workshop (2017) include:

Urban planners are not taught as to how to look at certain groups such as the homeless. (An Urban Researcher, Delhi)

Areas of traditional communities such as the kolis [fishing community] in Mumbai, are classified as slums and earmarked for demolitions. (An Academic from Architecture School, Mumbai)

These traditional communities surviving in or negotiating with the city are actually helping the city to survive and thrive. (An Urban Policy Researcher, Delhi)

The curriculum contents should be inter-disciplinary. By inter-disciplinary we mean that in the theory courses, the issue of climate change has to be mainstreamed within courses on transport, environment, housing or even the politics of planning. In the studio, if a transport plan is prepared then it has to be based around the theme of ‘low-carbon transport’ and not just mobility, which is the traditional transport planning approach inherited by the developing countries from the developed world. Similarly, inclusive planning is not an additional feather on a cap, but the way decisions about land are taken to enable so the urban poor have housing access or an affordable public transport system pass by low-income settlements, and so on.

Pedagogy

The discussion on pedagogy were highly limited in the workshops and one-to-one discussions. One graduate student (2017) mentioned: ‘planning education did not teach innovations’. A researcher from Delhi suggested developing case studies to be used as teaching materials in the classes so that the reality of urban India is reflected in what the urban planners learn in the classrooms. The newer programmes dealing with urban development, for example, at IIHS, have developed cases to be used for the purposes of teaching. Hence, the pedagogical approach has shifted towards learning through case discussions. However, there is a caveat on the case study approach. ‘The case study should be seen in a relational sense, as to how it speaks to the larger city-level processes’. (An academic from educational institute, Bengaluru, 2017).

The Way Forward: Radical Reorientation Required

Urban planning is critical in a developing country such as India, which is expected to experience high rates of economic growth and urbanization amidst multiple global challenges and agendas. This realization has led Kumar et al. (2016) to argue for expanding the scope of urban planning education, albeit without giving up on the traditional master planning approach. Bhan et al. (2018) have proposed to re-examine not just the content of the urban planning education, but also its pedagogy and scope. From the current state of cities and their various discontents spilling out on the roads, the need for redefining urban planning is well established. From a practical perspective, especially in a privatized education system, wherein professional courses require a good ‘job placement’, with large number of students coming out with dim employment prospects, there is also a pressure building up to expand the scope of urban planning. Thus, a radical rethinking of what urban planning is, at least in the Indian context, is required, much in contrast to the current national thinking about ‘city beautification’ and ‘signature buildings’ (Varghese, 2020).

The redefinition of ‘urban planning’ itself could be supportive of the processes of urban transformation in a democratic way, so as to be able to meet the NUA and the SDGs. In other words, as argued in the beginning, the scope of urban planning needs to be socially progressive (Watson, 2016; Zinkernagel et al., 2018), with a possibility of bringing in equity and justice within urban planning and development (Sietchiping et al., 2016).

The reform has to be radical because urban planning has to be about what Indian cities require and its education has to be about students becoming professionals who would develop such a critical thinking. The students coming out of the planning programmes need to be able to relate the local to the global and vice-versa, be more political as oppose to technocratic in problem-solving efforts, be able to draw from case study evidence within problem-solving efforts and above all, think futuristically. Planning graduates could be different types of planning professionals: spatial planners dealing with political economy of land, community planners organising local communities in local decision-making, project planners dealing with project management, financing and implementing, or urban managers. Table 2 suggests how broad the spectrum of urban planning programmes could be, along with a list of core courses for all students of urban planning (irrespective of type of planning selected) and some specific courses for each type of planning. This schema is open for discussion.

Table 2.

Suggestive Urban Planning Programme

Core courses	Basic statistical methods
	Spatial analysis tools
	Urbanization and economic development
	Poverty and inequality
	Ecology, environment and climate change
	Communications and negotiations
Spatial planner	Planning legislation
	Urban economics—land markets and land uses
	Regional economics—infrastructure planning and economic development
	Land use planning mechanisms
Community planner	Sociology/Anthropology/Culture
	Behavioural studies
	Participatory methods
	Theatre and media
Project planner	Urban economics
	Finance—public and private
	Project management
	Contract preparation
Urban management/governance	Urban political economy
	Urban administration within national system
	Finance and financial planning at the national level
	Planning legislation

Source: The authors.

Note: These are tentative suggestions and require further discussion.

However, it may be the case that all educational institutions may not be able to offer courses required for different types of planners. Thus, an individual academic institute should be able to decide their programmes unbounded by the restrictions imposed by the ITPI and the AICTE. There has to be a quality monitoring/accreditation agency which does not pre-define what urban planning or an urban planner is.

Lastly, we propose that academic institutions should take the lead. Since, there is no constituency for reform among regulatory and professional planning agencies, academic institutions are the ones on whom the hope of redefining urban planning practice and its education is bestowed. These radical changes in the urban planning education require a macro-environment that encourages and facilities flexibility in curriculum contents, pedagogy and faculty policies, student admission policy and a slew of other reforms (see Chandra, 2017) in the universities and institutions of higher education in India. Thus, the two-pronged radical reforms are required, one at the macro level of allowing ‘multiple flowers to bloom’, that is allowing individual university/institution to decide their academic programme and functioning, and other within the urban planning education. For the latter to be relevant in India there is a need to revise and broaden the scope of the urban planning profession, non-standardize its contents, pay attention to substantive aspects including issues of equity and sustainability, have a future-facing approach towards dealing with climate change and rethink its pedagogic methods. However, for these changes to occur, urban planning educational institutes must take the lead and initiate radical reforms in country’s higher education regulatory system along with other higher education institutions.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors are solely responsible for the views expressed and the accuracy of its findings.

Funding

The early research was taken up under the project ‘Building Inclusive Urban Communities (BinUComm)’ anchored at the Centre for Urban Equity (CUE), CEPT University and was funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Notes

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