A few years ago I was invited to participate in a unique global academic collaboration among urban planning educators in several countries, including the U.K., Spain, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Norway, Belgium, Greece and Turkey. Our fearless leader, Abbas Ziafati Bafarasat from the U.K.’s Oxford Brookes University, was originally planning a single article. As sometimes happens, quickly the scope of the collaboration exceeded the bounds of a single article, and recently the second of three planned articles from this group has appeared.

The first, published in 2025, was titled “Planning Competencies and Transformative Pedagogy for Sustainable Development,” proposes a set of planning competencies for sustainable development, and argues for the importance of transformative learning to achieve them. Since there’s a lot of regional variation to how urban planning is taught and practiced, it was a fun exercise to think together with such a diverse group about how we could align our ideas around some shared educational outcomes for sustainable communities. Although we developed our argument by creating a database of pedagogical case studies, we didn’t actually have room to publish them in the original article.

The recent paper, published this month, contains those case studies. This paper is titled “Towards Immersive and Situated Learning: International Comparative Evidence on Experiential Learning in Planning Education.” (See our graphical abstract below — yes, it was created by AI, but the ideas are ours!) My own course on scenario planning (that I hope to re-launch next year after a one-year hiatus), provides an illustration of the “technological hybridity” which emerged as a theme across our cases. The other cases, which feature fieldwork, policy simulations, place audits, and community-serve learning, provide a fascinating tapestry of experiential learning in the field.

The course I contributed, called simply Scenario Planning, uses the code URP 526 in the U-M system. Current students can reach out to for details about when it will be offered. I don’t actually have a freestanding website about it, but you can read a bit about it here from when it received a pedagogy award in 2022. A professional workshop I offer, which draws on material from the course, will be offered in-person only next May through the College of Engineering’s Professional Education unit.

The final paper from this collaboration, currently under review, asks whether the competencies we identify in the first paper align with the formal systems of planning competencies adopted in various countries, including by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) here in the U.S.. Although planning pedagogy and professional standards are definitely a bit of a wonky topic, our comparative research has helped me see planning as both a situated and global field, and given me a fascinating window into what’s happening in planning classrooms worldwide. Since these articles are both open access, they’re available to anyone interested in taking a look.