Investigating the fate of utopia in planning curricula in the face of evidence based planning

This research is concerned with the utopian project within planning and what is happening to it. Planning is not merely a practice of land use management, it is not even merely about strategic implementation of plans, it includes the critical process of envisaging futures which have not yet come to pass. In planning education this utopian, future visioning side of the profession is taught in a variety of ways, though training students in participatory planning, future scenario building, and strategic planning. However, we live at a time when big data, AI, and especially calls for evidence-based planning, risk burying any critical alternative future that might be developed under an avalanche of data which necessarily comes from past practices. Further, the need to add features of big data analysis, and AI supported urban management tools into planning education risks pushing this utopian aspect of planning out of undergraduate programmes.
The research therefore undertakes a comparative analysis of undergraduate planning curricula in Australia and China to explore whether and how the turn toward evidence based planning, is reshaping planning programmes and the effect of that on the utopian side of planning education.