Would
the "Real" Planners Please Stand Up?:
Four Views on Naming, Framing and Identity in Planning Education
By Gerda R. Wekerle
The idea for this dialogue was formed at the ACSP luncheon last year in Atlanta. Two colleagues, one senior-level and well-established, the other newly hired to a planning program after a long and successful career in another field, recounted stories of their experiences feeling marginalized and particularly, of being told by colleagues or students that they would never amount to "real" planners. Both of these colleagues were women. A few days later, as I was driving home from work, my mind kept turning over these stories and some of my own experiences, and the phrase "Would the real planners please stand up" popped into my head.
So here we are, four faculty members who teach planning in two Canadian planning programs. We have each constructed our own stories around this theme of planning, identity and legitimacy and hope that this dialogue will open up discussions and the sharing of your stories.
Professional Identities and Boundary Maintenance
By Gerda R. Wekerle
In the past, when people asked whether I was a planner, I hedged. "Sort of," I said. "I teach planning or planners; I write about planning; I even do some planning. But I have three degrees in sociology, not planning." Last summer, I took two exams and subsequently received a document in the mail pronouncing me a "registered professional planner." That piece of paper formalized my official status as a planner, but my identities remain multiple. I’m also still a sociologist, geographer and women’s studies scholar, and I see the world and frame my approach to teaching through these multiple lenses and allegiances. Yet getting that planning certificate has changed my status in some people’s eyes. A colleague at a planning conference congratulated me on passing the accreditation exams–the only sociologist, he claims, who has ever done so. "You’ve written piles of stuff over the years," he said, "but now you’re a real…." "Stop right there. Don’t say it," I said.
Over the past thirty years that I have taught planning and planning students, a recurrent theme has been who is a "real" planner. Perhaps this question occurs more in interdisciplinary programs than in planning departments, where ipso facto everyone there is assumed to be a planner. But in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, the boundaries between registered professional planners and others have been sharply drawn, although they have become somewhat more fluid over the past few years. I have concluded, despite the claims that planning as a profession has very permeable boundaries, that planners, or at least planning educators, often see their roles in terms of boundary maintenance for the profession at large. Planning education may even lag behind planning practice, making restrictive assumptions as to who will or will not make a "good" planner.
Deeply embedded in admissions procedures are assumptions about what it takes to become a planner, and the kinds of qualities, temperaments and experiences that planning programs seek in students. Many planning programs have a checklist to rank student applications. Typically, admissions committees give higher rankings to students with degrees in geography, engineering, architecture or business, and to students who took math or statistics, or more recently GIS, based on the assumption that they will do better at planning than a student who graduated as a filmmaker, for instance. Committees may never even consider applicants with degrees in fine arts, humanities or communications.
These kinds of selection criteria affect the classroom mix, the range of student experiences and the openness of students to alternative ways of knowing and problem-solving. But we usually do not test these assumptions against our experiences in the classroom, where students with more non-conventional backgrounds often make strong contributions to class discussions, group projects or community collaborations.
I want to outline a different model. Graduate students studying planning at York are admitted to an interdisciplinary Faculty of Environmental Studies. We do not have a separate scoring sheet for planning applications, although students may indicate that planning is their primary interest. After the first term, all students engage in a personal planning exercise. They write a plan of study, indicating their learning objectives and how they propose to achieve them. Some students discover planning at this point; others decide that planning is not for them. While many of our students do have backgrounds in geography, urban studies and architecture, many others come with