 | The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (June 2019) |
Urban planning education is a practice of teaching and learning urban theory, studies, and professional practices. The interaction between public officials, professional planners and the public involves a continuous education on planning process. Community members often serve on a city planning commission, council or board. As a result, education outreach is effectively an ongoing cycle. Formal education is offered as an academic degree in urban, city, rural, and/or regional planning, and more often awarded as a master's degree specifically accredited by an urban planning association in addition to the university's university-wide primary accreditation, although some universities offer bachelor's degrees and doctoral degrees also accredited in the same fashion; although most (but not all) bachelor's degrees in urban planning do not have the secondary-layer of urban planning association accreditation required for most positions, relying solely on the university's primary accreditation as a legitimate institution of higher education. At some universities, urban studies, also known as pre-urban planning, is the paraprofessional version of urban and regional planning education, mostly taken as a bachelor's degree prior to taking up post-graduate education in urban planning or as a master's or graduate certificate program for public administration professionals to get an understanding of public policy implications created by urban planning decisions or techniques.
Since planning programs are usually small, they tend not to be housed in distinct "planning schools" but rather, as part of an architecture school, a design school, a geography department, or a public policy school since these are cognate fields. Generally speaking, planning programs in architecture schools focus primarily on physical planning and design, while those in policy schools tend to focus on policy and administration. For instance, in Finland there is no separate degree program for "urban planning", but rather is considered as a specialty within the Finnish schools of architecture, and which students opt for towards the end of their studies and when choosing a diploma thesis, but officially graduating with a degree in architecture; and even post-graduate studies and doctoral theses in urban and regional planning are within the purview of architecture education.[1]