News

This year the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN) will be meeting in Ahmedabad, India, where the Asian Planning Schools Association (APSA) is hosting their biennial conference from 24 to 26 November.

AAPS has been successful in securing additional grant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for capacity building in case study research and publication. This project will commence in January 2010, and will run for one year. The approved budget for this project is US$ 319,000. For more details on the project, follow this link or contact Nancy Odendaal at Nancy.Odendaal@uct.ac.za.

The Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Research Network has announced a call for proposals for its 2010 competition for research grants with a total value of up to $CAN 50,000 each.

Prof Peter Robinson from the University of KwaZulu-Natal has just completed a book on strategic planning. This book will be of interest to anyone involved in built environment planning and development, to strategic planning theorists and practitioners in any field, and to urban historians and geographers who wish to understand the processes that drive the development of towns and cities.

It has been structured in the format of a textbook for students, a handbook for practitioners, or a training manual.

AAPS Project Coordinator Nancy Odendaal is currently visiting the member schools of AAPS. The intention of the visits is to ensure that the ‘Revitalising Planning Education in Africa’ project gets maximum buy-in from member schools, and assist their participation, and also to reinforce the network.

SAGE is currently offereing free online access to a selection of its journals.

The 2009 Global Report on Human Settlements, themed ‘Planning Sustainable Cities’, was released this week by UN-Habitat. Information is available online here.

The University of the Witwatersrand is seeking a suitably qualified candidate to head the School of Architecture and Planning. The School combines the professional disciplines of Architecture and Urban & Regional Planning as well as the postgraduate disciplines of Development Planning, Housing and Urban Design.

The 2009 Global Report on Human Settlements (GRHS) is to be published by UN-Habitat in October 2009. This edition is entitled: ‘Planning Sustainable Cities’. This publication includes a chapter on planning education that incorporates substantial contributions from a number of AAPS member schools.

The AAPS Editorial Board considered a number of journal articles submitted to it, and voted the following three in ranked order to submit to the International Editorial Board of Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning, volume 4. We congratulate those who were successful.

NEW BOOK:

WHY PLANNING DOES NOT WORK. LAND-USE PLANNING AND RESIDENTS’ RIGHTS IN TANZANIA. BY TUMSIFU NNKYA (2008)

Published by Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd, Dar es Salaam. www.mkukinanyota.com

PO Box 4246, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. ISBN 978-9987-449-68-2

This book presents a detailed account of land use planning practice in the context of public land ownership policy in Tanzania.

Papers from each of the member schools that participated in the AAPS workshop held in 2008 are now available in the ‘Downloads’ section.

AAPS welcomes Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, in Nigeria to the network. This brings the total number of planning schools to 29. We hope to increase this number in future. See the members page for details on this school.

This Association has functioned since 2000 as an electronic network of urban and regional planning schools in Anglo-phone Africa. In 2001 it became the 9th planning school association in the world, and became a member of the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN). It has now grown to 26 member universities, but has never been able to meet due to the constraints of travel costs.

Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning (volume 4), edited by: Thomas L. Harper, Michael Hibbard, Heloisa Costa, Anthony Gar-On Yeh