Spatial planning practice have historically developed through different trajectories in the Global North and Global South. Planning originated as a technical-rational enterprise in industrialized Northern contexts. Postcolonial Southern cities often adopted and imposed these Northern models. However, from the late 20th century, Southern urban scholars and activists generated new planning theories and practices grounded in local realities.
Southern planning theory and pratice emphasized bottom-up community-based planning, appropriate technology, and facilitating marginalized groups’ access to land resources. It advocated participatory, contextualized knowledge creation with planners as facilitators rather than technicians. Arguments drew from postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and indigenous epistemologies.
The main goal of the course is to learn from pracitioneer and planning ideas from the Global South. The course - held in hybrid form - with (4-5) online lectures on different regions in the global south (20-25 minutes impulse by a guest lecture, discussants (2-3 students) and general discussion/lessons learned (e.g. in breakout groups), market place of ideas at the end of the semester in presence (the students have to research in small groups (+/- 3 students) interesting planning ideas and approaches in a selected region of the global south, summarize and process them in a paper.
Desk research
Discussant-Modell and collaboration with peers
Written, graphical, and oral research methods
