The Routledge Companion to Professional Awareness and Diversity in Planning Education engenders a discourse on how urban planning as a discipline is being made attractive to children and youth as they consider their career preferences. It also provides a discourse around the diversity challenges facing the institutions for training urban planning professionals.
This Companion is an impressive collection of initiatives, experiences, and lessons in helping children, youth, and the general public appreciate the importance of, and the diversity challenge confronting, the urban planning profession and education. It comprises empirical, experimental, and case study research on initiatives to address the professional awareness and diversity challenges in urban planning. It has uniquely assembled voices and experiences from countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Contributors are educators, practitioners, and activists of urban planning as well as policymakers in their respective countries.
This Companion is intended as a resource for urban planning schools and departments, foundations, non-profit organizations, private sector organizations, public institutions, teachers, and alumni, among others to learn and consciously drive efforts to increase planning education awareness among children, youth, and the general public.
About the Author: Stephen Kofi Diko is Assistant Professor at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis, Tennessee (USA). He holds a PhD in Regional Development Planning from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio (USA). His research interests and experiences encompass urban green spaces, climate change, flooding, informality, community economic development, plan quality assessments, and urban planning awareness. He explores these interests through the lens of sustainable urban development and policy both at the local and global levels.
Leah Marie Hollstein is Assistant Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are in the areas of environmental planning, green infrastructure, land use planning, planning practice and education, and planning research methods.
Danilo Palazzo is Professor and Director of the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati, USA. Prior to moving to Cincinnati, Palazzo was on the faculty at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy. Palazzo has authored, with Frederick Steiner, Urban Ecological Design: A Process for Regenerative Places (2011), as well as contributing a chapter on "Pedagogical Tradition" to the Companion to Urban Design (2011). He is the author, with Vikas Mehta, of Companion to Public Space (2020).
