Urban Planning Education in Post-Socialist Countries In View of Global Challenges of Urban Development. Based on The Example of Poland.
Bartosz Kaźmierczak
Abstract
Challenges the modern world poses before urban planners are becoming more and more demanding. Global changes, including social, economic and environmental changes, require new approaches to planning and managing the functional and spatial urban tissue. The need for new competences to be acquired by urban planners in the course of their professional education is in particular visible in the countries which quickly transformed from the centrally planned economy and party controlled management to neo-liberal, free market economy. These countries failed to satisfactorily develop mechanisms controlling the spatial growth of the cities; what is more, we can observe in these countries a decline in public trust put in the urban planner, a professional taught to introduce the above mentioned controlling mechanisms. This article aims to define the most important competences an urban planner should have in view of the challenges posed by the modern world and to compare them with the teaching standards applicable at architecture and urban planning study program. The research was based on the guidelines published by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, developed in the light of the applicable UE requirements. In this article, the author attempts to answer the question whether the European teaching standards applicable to urban planning satisfactorily safeguard the right profile of education offered by universities within urban planning study programs in Poland.