Home › Publications › Fundamentally, higher education spaces are sites of imagined promise. This promise of higher education works at multiple levels. In our current paper, we look at this promise at two levels – the promise that learners in these spaces buy into when they access higher education and the promise that these spaces hold for larger societal development. The world over, these promises are particularly relevant to the fields that broadly fall into the space of ‘professional education’. In the current paper, we focus particularly on Planning education. The study under which this paper is prepared was conducted under Work Package 5 of the KNOW project. The project led by University College London seeks to deliver transformative research and capacity-building for innovation in policy and planning to promote urban equality. Work Package 5 particularly looked at planning education, its multiple layers and the ways in which it intersected with the notion of equity, equality and the idea of a just city. The project examined these layers at the individual, institutional and network levels. The current paper presents findings from the layer examining individual experiences. This layer of the study looked at the experiences of alumni of planning programmes at various universities across the global South. The sites of investigation included premier planning education departments in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Tanzania. The study relied primarily on comparative qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and followed the principles of narrative storytelling and reflexive methodology as a method. The value added to professional education, and its increased orientation to service the global economy, over time has increased in the neo-liberal era (Slaughter & Rhoads, 2000; Kamat, 2011). With this contested transition, the values inherent to higher education spaces have come into a state of tension – for instance, the values of critical pedagogy – leading to democratic practice, and social justice sometimes comes into conflict between the instrumental nature of professional higher education spaces where the emphasis is on ‘return on investment’ (Slaughter & Rhoads, 2000). If the imperatives of social justice and democratic practice are to hold, not only in educational places but also in professional environments, then the ways in which such education is consumed is important to understand. Further, workforce participation and the ways in which students transitioning from educational spaces into the world of work carry ‘values’; and the ways in which such values are engaged with or transformed in everyday professional practice is also an important layer to uncover. Consumption of education in the higher education space is a result of complex interplays between site and person. The structural edifice of higher education and the world of work are sometimes aligned with people’s experiences and aspirations or, at other times, become sites of struggle. In such sites, there are multiple nodes of engagement where students’ and professionals’ experiences intersect with established 2 structures and are shaped by them. In this paper, we particularly look at Discipline (Planning degrees and Planning work), Curriculum (in planning schools and their use in professional environments) and Social dynamics and Identity (in educational and professional sites). At these intersections, an understanding of the ways in which participants make meaning and articulate their modes of practice (as students and professionals) offers important insights into the ways in which notions of equity and equality are engaged with by students and alumni in urban/planning educational and professional spaces.