Film is a long-established medium for the analysis, representation and commentary of the urban condition from a range of disciplines, including Geography, Sociology, and of course, Film Studies. Planners too have engaged with the potential of film, most notably Gold and Ward (1997), ‘Of Plans and Planners’, and Tewdwr-Jones, ‘Urban Reflections’ (2011).

Meanwhile, planning education frequently utilises film as a resource within courses that deal with planning history, such as utopian New Town promotional films such as Charley in New Town (1948) or analytical films exposing the conditions of the city, such as Glasgow: The Blight (1982). Yet a systemic pedagogy of film in planning education remains underdeveloped, despite pedagogical reflection on film appearing in allied disciplines such as Geography (Sigler and Albandos, 2013) and Architecture (Farso & Petersen, 2015).

At the University of Glasgow, students on the MSc City Planning co-create the ‘Urbanism Film Club’ where themes on the ‘urban’ are explored. This talk will explore some films from this club, grouped into three themes: documentary film, international film, and feature film. The paper will reflect on the value of film’s ability to complement and enhance learning and student experience on an MSc programme in City Planning, including the various challenges and considerations that need to be addressed.

Refs

Farsø, M., & Petersen, R. M. (2015). Conceiving Landscape through Film: Filmic Explorations in Design Studio Teaching. Architecture and Culture, 3(1), 65–86. https://doi.org/10.2752/205078215X14236574273664

Gold, J. and Ward, S. (1997) ‘Of Plans and Planners: Documentary film and the challenge of the urban future,1935–52’ in Clarke, D (ed). The Cinematic City. London: Routledge.

Sigler, T., & Albandoz, R. I. (2014). Beyond Representation: Film as a Pedagogical Tool in Urban Geography. Journal of Geography, 113(2), 58–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221341.2013.764918

Tewdwr-Jones, M. (2011) Urban Reflections: Narratives of place, planning and change. Policy Press. University of Bristol.

Assessment, as a pillar and one of the most essential components of teaching and learning practice in higher education, has drawn attention from educators, teachers, and pedagogical researchers. Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI), as a fast-evolving technology, would impact planning education and practice, and might change the way how assessment should be designed for planning students. The overall aim of this research is to provide a better understanding of how Generative AI change the way of designing authentic assessments and to provide prompts that enable further in-depth discussion and rethinking of how to adapt and appropriately use Generative AI in the design of authentic assessments in the subject area of Town and Regional Planning. A multi-methods approach combining literature analysis, questionnaire survey, and a focus group was adopted. The literature analysis provided an overall understanding of the research context about how various subject areas treat Generative AI in higher education. A questionnaire survey in a planning society, managed by the Planning discipline at the University of Liverpool, consists of educators, practitioners, and students, and the focus group involving frontline planning educators were conducted. The study collected experience, opinions and thoughts in real-world teaching, learning, and practice, which provided a better understanding of how Generative AI, as a newly emerging, fast-involving, and disruptive technological tool will affect planning education and the requirements of knowledge and skills in the contemporary planning industry, and how the industry should adapt to the transition.

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.