Planning education is under sustained pressure to respond rapidly to iterative policy reform, technological change, and spatial and climate crises. This has oriented planning curricula toward responsiveness, and continual updating- qualities with genuine professional value, but which risk narrowing planning's intellectual project to adaptive problem-solving.
This paper argues that planning education is a key institutional arena in which the epistemic and temporal foundations of the discipline are reproduced, and renewed- and that the temporal assumptions embedded in curriculum design and content choices deserve explicit critical scrutiny.
Drawing on curriculum organisation, pedagogical practice, and patterns in postgraduate dissertation topics across Jordanian (Al Khalidi et al., 2022) and UK institutions, the paper identifies a shared but differently constituted conditions of temporal misalignment: a gap between what curricula position students to know and the planning challenges they will encounter. While the nature of this misalignment differs across contexts- shaped by the distinct pressures, resources, and contingencies that planning as both a profession and a pedagogical practice faces- in both cases it narrows the space for normative judgement and contested expertise.
Building on social theories of temporality (Adam & Groves, 2007; ), and critical account of knowledge formation in higher education (Clegg, 2010) and current debates on planning temporal’s governance (Dobson & Parker, 2024), the paper advances temporal reflexivity as a pedagogical project to recognise competing temporalities in planning knowledge, make deliberate space for critical reasoning under conditions of systemic change, and work through uncertainty without premature closure.