Teaching of planning and urban planning

Abstract

The current academic and professional training of the urban planner is undergoing substantial changes: they are affected by a cultural transformation that has taken place over the last few decades. The reason is linked to the changes that have affected the modern society and the modern territory, in relation to a growing systemic complexity that requires broader and more diversified skills and abilities from the urban designers. In the same way, the citizens’ interests have also changed and amplified: socio-economic dynamics intersected with the emergence of complex procedural issues and with interpretative problems, in relationship with issues of environmental sustainability, regulatory evolution, new technologies and crisis in the construction sector.
The teaching of urban planning disciplines had to be adapted to these new challenges, even in the context of university courses that are not strictly oriented to the training of future urban planners. This has resulted in a range of new scientific and technical knowledge to be assimilated, in interdisciplinary approaches and innovative techniques and tools that respond flexibly to changing social and economic factors, to the theme of planetary urbanization, migration and multiculturalism, as well as to the progressive negative impacts on the environment. The University has the task of ensuring innovative training courses that stimulate the development of professional articulated skills, that pushes towards scientific knowledge, aiming at active involvement in the design phase, orienting itself towards intervention on the built environment and urban regeneration. These issues formed the focus of the XII International Day of INU Study, offering a perspective on the teaching of urban planning and the academic training of urban planners.