Fundamentally, higher education spaces are sites of imagined promise. This promise of higher
education works at multiple levels. For the 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 on Planning education, particularly. 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 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 networks 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 as the 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.