About our program
- What do planners do?
- Why study planning? Why now?
- The evolution of planning
- Our approach to planning
- Connections with other faculties and departments
- Our commitment to diversity
- Our history
- The city
What do planners do?
At the heart of planning lies a commitment to better city-regions, healthy environments and social and economic well-being for everyone. Planners work for the public good—tempering market rationality with social considerations and injecting a long-term view to debates about the shape of urban futures. They pursue these objectives as policy makers, public servants, builders, community organizers and political activists, working at all levels of government, in the non-profit sector or in private practice.
Although the built environment has been their traditional field of practice, today’s planners may work on social, economic and cultural issues. Their work ranges from the design of individual communities to policy planning at the national level to international development. Planning specializations include land use, housing, transportation, urban design, social policy, public health, economic development, international development, and the environment—among others.
Why study planning? Why now?
This is a time of rapidly increasing global demand for expertise and creativity in planning, as city-regions throughout the world face diverse challenges to the quality and sustainability of urban life. In this context, the education of planners assumes an unprecedented importance. The growing need for planning practitioners and academics worldwide is linked to:
- an increasing awareness of the importance of city-regions to economic viability, social cohesion, environmental sustainability and human well-being;
- the escalation of social conflicts stemming from rapid and uneven urban growth across the globe;
- the need to ensure that the demographics of planning institutions and academic departments are representative of the populations they aim to serve.
The evolution of planning
A historical perspective acknowledges at least five (sometimes overlapping) strands of planning in the modern world.
- The liberal-humanist tradition arose in part as a response to the unhealthy living conditions of 19th-century industrial cities, and involved contributions from public health, civil engineering, architecture and urban design.
- Utopian-revolutionary planning also emerged in the 19th century, and was intended not simply to improve the socio-spatial conditions of capitalist urbanism, but to transform them radically. This is the tradition of planning understood as social change, exemplified in the early moments of modernism and still active today, for instance, in the worldwide anti-neoliberal movement.
- The learning-by-doing approach (or the “science of muddling through”) has a long history, based on the American philosophy of pragmatism.
- The current mainstream tradition of planning focuses on policy analysis and is largely rooted in neoclassical economics and the social sciences (which sometimes defines planning as the rectification of market failure).
- A socially and culturally diverse approach to planning has emerged out of a special concern with the situation of culturally or economically marginalized groups (including women, people of colour, gays and lesbians, the homeless, immigrants and refugees, Aboriginals, seniors), and emphasizes consultation and participation, rather than top-down social engineering.
Different conceptions of planning have been dominant at different times. From the Second World War until about the mid-1970s, for example, the most influential theories and practices of planning owed much to the values of the Welfare State and Keynesian economics. The last two decades of the 20th century, by contrast, witnessed the ascent of neoliberal ideology which has left its mark on planning practice.
In every era, the kind of planning that has dominated has been determined by the balance of power between different social groups. Therefore the meaning of planning in the 21st century will depend on how planners interact with other political groups and work with communities in the emerging social and political struggles of our time.
Our approach to planning
If what planners do and how they think about the world are diverse, what constitutes the unity of their art and science? From a pedagogical standpoint, we can identify three questions that concern all planners.
- How did the world of our cities get to be the way it is?
- What kind of cities—or world—do we want to live in?
- How do we get from what we have to what we want?
In our program, we address all three fundamental and interrelated questions.
A unique feature of our program is its location in a Geography Department—where faculty and students work across the domains of spatial analysis and planning intervention, theory and practice, reflection and action. This location gives planning students access to a remarkably wide range of courses and faculty with expertise pertinent to all domains of planning.
The program offers applied courses in the form of workshops, internships, international field courses and the Current Issues Paper (an individual piece of primary research on a practical topic), which emphasize testing ideas and skills, and bringing real-world problems into the classroom for critical reflection.
The approach to planning we advocate is interdisciplinary, critical and engaged. Students can engage with planning theory and history, political economy and public finance, economics, research methods, policy analysis, urban design, architecture, environmental studies, international development, anthropology, history, feminism, Marxism, critical theory, cultural studies, as well as urban, social, historical and cultural geography.
Connections with other faculties and departments
The program benefits from close ties to the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Planning (FALD), strengthened by our collaborative Master of Urban Design Studies Program.
Our productive relationships with the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, Engineering, History, Management, Political Science, Social Work and Sociology are important to the student experience. We also have connections to University of Toronto research institutions such as the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, the collaborative Community Development Program, the newly established Cities Centre, the School of Public Policy, the Munk Centre for International Studies, the Centre for Environment, and the Centre for the Study of the United States.
Our commitment to diversity
A strong commitment to diversity is another vital hallmark of our program. We want to reflect the increasing social diversity of global cities in our student population and faculty, and we take pride in our efforts to bring a true diversity of perspectives on planning and related issues into our classrooms.
We recognize that these objectives can be achieved in part through curriculum development, but are also enhanced by recruitment strategies. The purpose of recruiting the best talent from a wide range of ethnoculturally diverse communities is not merely to ensure the demographic composition of the existing program better reflects that of the urban region, but to enrich it by creating an intellectual environment where diverse opinions about what planning is and should be may thrive.
We welcome students with diverse educational backgrounds and work experiences, working in both international and domestic realms, from Canada and countries around the world.
Our history
Formal instruction in Town and Regional Planning was introduced at the University of Toronto in 1933 when lecture courses were given to architecture students at the undergraduate level. A Division of Town and Regional Planning was established in 1952 in the School of Architecture under the direction of Anthony Adamson. In 1954 the Division offered a program leading to a one year diploma in Town and Regional Planning. Adamson was succeeded by Gordon Stephenson and then John Dakin.
Under Dakin’s direction, the program was expanded to a two-year Master’s degree in 1963, and in 1967 the division became the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. The number of students and staff increased significantly in the 1970s. In 1981 the University decided to associate the program with a larger administrative unit, and transferred the program to the Department of Geography.
This transfer increased the faculty resources and provided an opportunity for revisions to the program. The current program was launched in September 1982, and was revised and expanded in 2000 with the establishment of the urban design specialization within Planning, and the Master of Urban Design Studies course of studies.
The launch of the PhD in Planning in September 2007 represents the most recent expansion of the program.
The city
The university is located near the centre of a metropolitan region of over 5.2 million people, noted for its social diversity, proactive government, excellent public transportation system, extensive library system, diverse cultural facilities and innovative approaches to housing and urban planning.
The dynamism of Toronto’s urban region provides planning students with an accessible laboratory for studying a wide range of planning issues. The region also has many outstanding practitioners, several of whom instruct courses in the program or offer regular seminars and workshops.
