Who do we teach urban planning to?

Abstract

When teaching urban planning, the comprehension of its role and meaning is at least as necessary as the technical knowledge, as the subject often has to deal with changes not yet or not always decipherable.

Although it has been deeply changing over the last decades, urban planning keeps being founded on space and society: the references to common interest, to collectivity, to the value and primacy of the community on the one hand, and on the other hand the characteristics of urban space, its materials, its representation, its symbols and its physical and spatial dimensions, all need today to be taught with attention to the new generations’ reference points.

The concepts of space and community have in fact taken on new shapes, having broadened their references and modified spatial behaviours as well as the idea of space itself. The increase of general mobility and frequentation of the virtual space, the progressive individualisation of lifestyles, the representation of a  space less and less concrete, all these things influence our idea of space and specifically of urban space. For instance, in what spaces, both concrete and virtual, does the everyday life of young people happen? And what kind of space does youth culture in all its forms represent? And how has the feeling of community changed in its new manifold declinations?

Being the young generations the true recipients of the teaching, it is then necessary, as a foundation to the teaching itself, to investigate permanencies and mutations in their approach, competences, interests, perception of the subject and of space itself.