The recurrent difficulties of urban planning practices are often attributed, with good reasons, to external factors such as economic and social upheavals and the consequent detachment of public opinion from the ideal of collective responsibility and action as well as from the pursuit of broad societal objectives, e.g., [1]. “Urban planning—according to the Canadian School of Urban Planning at McGill University—also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning in specific contexts, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks, and their accessibility” [2]. As we will argue more fully in this contribution, one might suspect that the term “urban planning” tends to be widely used precisely because it is a very inclusive term, allowing for different kinds of practices, depending on the circumstances, ranging from urban studies to urban design, planning, urban management, administrative practices, urban marketing, and so on. As a result, teaching about it can be difficult, unless one chooses to teach its essential technical practice, which, partly to avoid confusion or misunderstanding, we define as spatial planning. As should be clear by now, we note that the term “spatial planning” is less analytically connoted than other adjectives (e.g., urban planning, landscape planning, environmental planning, etc.) and, therefore, can indicate the technical core of the discipline, which must be the object of teaching so as not to run into the difficulties and confusion induced by the usual term “urban planning”. The reader should acknowledge that the first and different version of this paper was presented by the authors at the 29th Annual Congress of the Association of European Schools of Planning [3].

Less common is the reflection on the more structural reasons inherent in the weakness of planners’ technical knowledge ^[4][5][4,5]. We contend that part of this weakness is due to how technical knowledge is formed and transmitted from one generation of planners to another. Given its normative nature affecting land use rights, urban planning is mostly taught in close relation to the legal frameworks and cultural contexts in which it is practiced. When we deal with planning, land “must be seen not as an isolated physical unit but as something integrated into the whole of the society with its rules, institutions and socio-economic characteristics”; in particular, “the use of land and the value of land is far more than can be seen by the naked eye. […] The rights to land, be it ownership or other interests, are vital”. And “spatial planning is to a great deal concerned with land in a broad sense” [6] (p. 2) [7]. Our study argues that, albeit understandably for practical reasons, this kind of teaching risks blurring the specific technical core of planning in a wide field of social science skills; thus, as a result, the students lack sufficient awareness of their future role and responsibility as “reflective practitioners” [8].

Teaching requires knowledge to be presented consistently to learners. This need is less apparent for urban planning education, as it concerns a complex field of knowledge and action in which diversity is a growing concern ^[9][10][9,10]. Planning education may be defined as the transmission of technical knowledge applied to the design and regulation of space in towns and countries, together with the ethical consciousness of how this knowledge can affect society and the environment. This entry is based on the idea that planning education ought to have a clear focus on specialized technical knowledge. Accordingly, spatial planning (see above) as technical expertise should be distinguished from urban governance as political decision-making. According to the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, urban governance is “the process by which governments (local, regional, and national) and stakeholders collectively decide how to plan, finance, and manage urban areas” [11]. However, the use of the term “governance” should not conceal the fact that only governments have the power to regulate land use. This proposal stems from the authors’ joint reflection occasioned by the preparation of a handbook on planning education—its fourth edition is forthcoming—at the request of a well-known Italian publisher of university textbooks [12].

As students from various countries might bear witness to, planning education is commonly related to national contexts, as are most textbooks. On the one hand, this approach to teaching is reasonable due to the embeddedness of planning practices in the institutional framework of legal obligations, administrative routines and social values, which are commonly known as national planning systems ^{[13][14][15][16]}[13,14,15,16]. On the other hand, the resulting teaching of technical knowledge is bound to contingent configurations of power and society and can barely be disentangled from them. Far from claiming that urban planning can be practiced somewhere as a value-free profession, the authors of the present entry nevertheless argue in favor of the viability of discerning its technical core for learning purposes. However, they fully recognize the validity of other educational approaches in the context of the debate on the training of urban planners, which takes on a global dimension with specific regional challenges ^[17][18][19][17,18,19].

The assumptions behind the proposed educational approach are the following:

• Spatial planning involves transmitting and helping to develop specialized technical knowledge.
• The technical aspects of planning knowledge may be clearly conveyed to students in theory and practice.
• The institutional frameworks of professional planning practice do not fully determine technical knowledge.

Regarding these three assumptions, planning handbooks typically take different approaches. Firstly, the subject matter is tied to a particular “national” context, e.g., ^[20][21][22][20,21,22], from which it follows that technical knowledge is presented in direct relation to its institutional codification within that national setting. When no specific context is specified, e.g., ^[23][24][23,24], the characterization of technical knowledge often remains ambiguous. Additionally, the knowledge imparted to students covers a range of areas, including administrative and procedural skills, urban design, urban studies, and public management. In this broad field, unless it is clearly distinct and organized in its components, technical knowledge can hardly find a proper place and, in most cases, is not “specific” to spatial planning [25].

An alternative mode of teaching requires handbooks to be based on new principles. The above-mentioned assumptions shape the understanding of what factors should be considered for training to take place without referring to a single national context. Instead, they lead to broadening the historical perspective to include authors and experiences that have laid the technical foundations of planning expertise. Disentangling planning education from single national or cultural backgrounds would enable international students to turn technical skills into professional proficiency in their countries of origin [26]. At the same time, it would make it easier for students to build international professional careers [27].

The following sections set out five theses, which give the reasons for the educational choices that should inform a handbook devised for teaching spatial planning across cultural contexts. It is appropriate to use a somewhat assertive tone to state the five theses, which are as follows:

• Urban and regional planning is a blurred field of knowledge: its technical core should be identified as spatial planning. (The term “urban and regional planning” is introduced here to refer to the extension of the “urban planning” approach (see above) beyond the urban dimension, with the ideal inclusion of the entire region. This is, after all, the logical and rhetorical operation deliberately carried out by Patrick Abercrombie in 1933 (the first edition of his book) to legitimize the planner’s profession beyond the urban dimension so that he would also be concerned with the countryside and landscape [28]).
• Spatial planning serves as a tool for achieving urban governance objectives.
• In an educational context, spatial planning methods should be linked to zoning. (The earliest known forms of spatial planning, thousands of years ago, consisted of the division of the urban area into zones and the allocation of some areas for public use over others for predominantly private use [29]. In modern times, zoning is recognized in German administrative culture between 1870 and 1915 as an instrument related to building regulations. In the early 1900s, it entered the town planning legislation of some countries (e.g., in Sweden in 1907 and in England in 1909 with the Town Planning Act). In 1916, New York City first adopted it to classify the entire city, built and unbuilt parts [30]. As is known, the historic US Supreme Court case “Ambler vs. Euclid” led in 1926 to the constitutionalizing of zoning in the US [31]).
• Modern spatial planning has identifiable historical roots, the study of which forms the basis for all further learning.
• Urban governance is not technical knowledge but rather a political practice that may be taught to explain the effects of spatial planning.

In conclusion (Section 7), a few considerations are drawn regarding the relationship between planning education and civic progress.