Abstract
When I look back to 1974 when the journal was first established and I became involved in the editorial board led by the then editor Lionel March, the editorials including my own that I began to write in the early 1980s, had a strong focus on education. Lionel talked a lot about what design education should focus upon while I argued that physical planning was in crisis and in terms of how we trained planners, we needed to restore the vision that had been carved out so vividly by the early pioneers, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Raymond Unwin, Patrick Abercrombie amongst others. In the 1960s there was the prospect that architecture and planning could be put on a much firmer footing. By adopting the methods of science, these had the potential to provide an informed view of how we might structure our intuitions, extending the prospect that these fields represented a natural convergence of both the arts and the sciences. In those days, most of us who ascribed to this view were deeply conscious of the need to fuse science and art; indeed the strongest perspectives that resonated with the aims of good architecture and planning, embraced these ‘two cultures’ as C. P. Snow so eloquently referred to them. Opening up the process of how we might produce good architecture and planning, far from clouding these domains in a new mystique, would, we argued, project a new transparency on the field. Indeed Lionel March (1980) in an editorial argued that what might be needed is a ‘third culture’, a synthesis of the sciences and the arts.
In fact these perspectives which first emerged in the early 1960s did not last very long. In developing a new, more transparent focus, the development of more scientific processes that mandated the need to understand best how buildings and cities evolved, tended to increase the mystique. There was also an almost inevitable clash between making the process of design explicit and in doing so by injecting scientific methods into the processes of understanding, prediction and prescription, into traditional intuitions that many argued were beyond the realm of any systematic study of our humanity. During the 1960s, the professional focus of design and planning also began to change as these fields rapidly moved to more consensual, less elitist pursuits. By the time this journal was set up in 1974 with the express intention of capturing, critiquing and disseminating these new approaches to architecture and planning, these fields continued to rapidly adopt new and different perspectives. The wider embedding of these domains into their social and political contexts changed the nature of design in terms of the focus of what was to be designed, who was best equipped to design and how good design could be produced. And various scientific approaches although continuing to be exploited, no longer provided a focus for the field, if they ever had. In short, what had become quite established professions in the first half of the 20th century, fragmented into more pluralistic pursuits with none of the certainty of their earlier years.
It was not really very surprising in hindsight that the period when this journal was set up was one of turmoil concerning the education of architects and planners. Some might object to classing these two professions together but at one level, the main argument was that both domains had begun to attract specialists, no longer trained in architecture or planning but in different natural and social sciences and this could bring real expertise to parts of these fields. Nevertheless, such partial perspectives seemed to lack the wider context of what architecture and planning were all about. Professionalism was under attack through new kinds of approach competing for the centre ground with the very idea that there might be a core expertise under close scrutiny. Lionel March (1980) argued that a generic design curricula was required which was strongly intellectual in flavour as well as espousing strong practical arguments. I proposed in one of my first editorials (Batty, 1983) that what was required was a ‘Plan for Planning Education’ focussing on how to inject not only a renewed spirit of the need for planning into the field but also fighting against the anti-intellectualism that increasingly dominated practice. In fact in the 1980s, the political environment in many advanced industrialised countries began to reflect this anti-intellectualism that found its way into practice, despite the emergence of many new technologies which are rapidly converging to determine what is now a manifestly digital world.
In the 1980s in Britain particularly, planning was very much on the retreat politically in terms of cuts in resources to central and local government all part of the systematic although gradual dismantling of a welfare state that had dominated society since the mid-century. This had a major impact on planning education with the graduate entry to the profession massively eroded by cuts in central funding. Undergraduate programmes did not fare quite so badly but the skill base of planning in methods and design was never very strong in those educational environments where the concern was more with administration and the social sciences. In short, through a combination of lack of central support for mainstream planning, the contraction of local government in terms of the ways in which its services were provided, the slow but sure disillusion with anything scientific, and the increasing focus on business with its anti-collective focus, the skill base of the profession became massively eroded of talent that was syphoned off to other pursuits. Yet at the same time, the digital society was being rapidly constructed through the decentralisation and miniaturisation of computers into new areas which offered intriguing possibilities for planners to practice their art: graphics, rudimentary text processing and network communications were all coalescing and converging by the end of the decade and the digital world offered the prospect of connecting everyone up through the visual media that came to be associated with the world wide web.
There is a somewhat quiet irony in the development of these information technologies which did of course begin to influence planning. Much administration and rudimentary survey analysis became key to the new generation of personal computers, for example, those dealing with the routine instruments of physical planning – maps in particular, GIS and database software – while word processing software, spreadsheets and simple drawing packages proliferated. However, the core of more formal ideas about how to study cities and to plan did not have much influence on the development of new software for planning. Urban computer modelling continued its slow evolution still beset by the sorts of problems identified by Lee (1973) and planning as a practice continued to diverge from efforts to develop it as a particular set of skills that pertained exclusively to the work of planners. In fact the skill sets needed barely evolved at all. In the mid-1980s as the personal computer was rapidly disseminated, there were efforts in the UK to steer the profession towards a new skill set. I acted as Chair of an RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute) Course Development Panel Working Party on Information Technology and Planning Education for which I produced a background report (Batty, 1984) and reflecting on it now, it was quite broad ranging and ambitious in content. But it went the way of several initiatives in planning. Somewhere I do have a copy of the report but ‘locked down’ in my inaccessible office at UCL and a detailed search of the web does not locate it, anywhere. In fact in 1984 when it was written, word processing software was in its infancy (WordStar I remember, Word Perfect maybe) and it is entirely possible that the report was typed on an IBM Selectric and that no digital copy ever existed. Even if it did, nothing from that era exists in my files, digital or otherwise. Whatever the case, the report is long gone but my point is that rather than being in the vanguard of how the profession might react to new technologies and new skills, the report and the working group were examples of several initiatives that almost sounded the death-knell for a profession intent on seeing planning more like ‘business’, dominated by yet ever more government bureaucracy, hardly an agenda for the City of Tomorrow or the City Beautiful.
These various initiatives were also paralleled by different groups working on methods for strategic planning (Batey and Breheny, 1982) but in hindsight much of this related to an earlier age when planners considered their role to be more focussed on preparing plans than on administrating a bureaucracy to reinforce standardised routines. The digital revolution which became all pervasive in terms of everyday life as well as science and even the media during the 1980s did of course make an impact on planning but the idea of the smart city where technologies had been miniaturised to the point where they could become embedded in the fabric of the city itself as well as in our own personal everyday activities, was still 20 years in the future. To an extent, planning continued to diverge and fragment. New digital tools did emerge but they were the prerogative of those who dealt with the functions of urban management in cities rather than being fashioned to prepare plans for the more efficient, sustainable, equitable future city.
With the emergence of computers associated with the person rather than the institution, specialisms were developed that found obvious applications in planning. Specialisms that were distinct from planning itself – GIS (geographic information systems) for example – rapidly emerged as much of the world around us became informed by digital technologies. GIS degrees emerged in the late 1980s and prospered in the 1990s only to become absorbed into the general skill levels of many graduates in science and engineering. Software became ever more user friendly, much of it free at the point of delivery, and spatial data became more open and standardised. In North America, these skills were absorbed somewhat more effectively into city planning courses but planning had always been more skill-based there. In the UK, there was of course a recognition that some of these skills should be incorporated into the education of planners but this barely lasted into the 1990s and in the last 30 years, the sheer array of seemingly relevant material became overwhelming and the time taken to acquire usable skills in the quantitative and digital domains, simply got crowded out. Most planners in so far as they have any such skills acquire these through choice rather than part of their curricula, and in the larger schools, specialist units have emerged that sometimes teach but use such skills in more specific research contexts which focus on data science, transportation and GIS. Many of the core skills involved in using these technologies in plan preparation are still sorely lacking.
What makes the picture highly fragmented and ever more so, is that all these new skills are necessary but they require very different mindsets from each other. Planning has always aspired to be synthetic and this has also been squeezed out by much more partial approaches to the city and to policy. In fact there are almost as many approaches to thinking about and understanding the city than there are people focussed on studying the city and the same goes for planning which is ever wider in its reach across global society. I quoted Wildavsky (1973) in my 1983 editorial on ‘A Plan for Planning Education’ who said: “If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing”, and many have always argued that it is impossible to define a core competency. One of the reasons why the debate over the training of planners initiated in Schuster’s (1950) Report focused on the provision of graduate versus undergraduate education was that graduate education appeared to provide some solid skills in architecture, civil engineering, even geography and economics that could be built upon. This viewpoint was in marked contrast to the view that planning should be pursued in its entirely at the first level of university education which would provide the focus and the time to develop a synoptic view.
From the 1980s, although I have been responsible for most of the editorials written in the journal, there has been distinct drop in a concern for what is the best and most important features of an education in design and planning as featured in these pages. This is characteristic of the wider decline in the professions which has paralleled the rise of the digital society where a much large proportion of the population has been exposed to (and to an extent have acquired) basic digital skills. More and more specific quantitative and formal skills but associated with a much wider array of domains, fields, subject areas and disciplines, have emerged and are being applied to our understanding and planning of cities. Many of my editorials have actually focussed on the content of these approaches, not on how we best educate and train our wider fraternity in these ideas. As the digital revolution has deepened and as cities have become automated through the injection of computation into their very fabric alongside the traditional use of computers employed to understand and explore this fabric, our focus on providing an integrated education about the planning of cities has weakened considerably. The last editorial I wrote on these matters in the late 1980s (Batty, 1989) was more than 30 years ago and since then the debate about planning education has veered away from concerns about skills to producing graduates with a general comprehension of a whole range of urban problems with many varied and different perspectives on cities and their planning. These of course are hard to integrate and of course a wider vision for planning is no longer very clear.
We now stand at another threshold. By the time the pandemic broke in 2020, we had reached a threshold in the digitisation of society that has thrown up the need for many new skills which are applicable to city planning. New ideas about mobility, about markets, and about the automation of many functions that make cities work in terms of linkages and movements are now mediated by new technologies all of which require detailed skills in their operation and implementation. To understand the future city especially given the new normal that may emerge in some form once the pandemic is controlled, we require powerful new skills to interpret what is likely to happen with respect to the way we work and socialise, and the way we move ourselves and our information within and across cities. There is now a powerful argument for a new form of synthetic education that combines the new skills sets in innovative ways that are both internally consistent and focussed. These skills also need to be built on top a full and diverse understanding of what cities are all about, how the challenges that beset them in terms of equity, efficiency, poverty and segregation might be approached using new data sets, models and design methods that grapple with the evident complexity that most now recognise as characteristic of the modern urban world.
The future does not reside in yet more short courses on smart cities which invariably are fairly superficial but probably a return to longer lived graduate education is required which is strongly focussed on building all the rudiments of a skill set that is directly applicable to the grand challenges facing our cities. Whether or not this be part of a profession is not directly relevant to what is taught but whatever the form it takes, it requires an education built on solid foundations and this suggests that it be at graduate level but with prerequisites. Far be it for me to sketch out what this might look like for the debate has to be joined in the first instance. It has barely begun. It may take a while yet for the new urban world to emerge built around the rapidly expanding digital platforms, smart city technologies and the new urban science that lies in the wings that might define planning education in the digital age. I often use these editorials to urge debates about important issues, and the need to bring together the many different ways we can understand and design future cities using digital tools is one of these. There is already an urgent to need to connect up and perhaps reconnect the many fragments that now exist and proliferate in our understanding of cities so that we can assemble these into more coherent ways to address what future cities should be like and how we might invent them.