Planning the paths of planning schools

City planning education began in the early twentieth century as reformers clamored for more cohesive approaches to urban problems of the industrial cities, and as architects, landscape architects and engineers thirsted for more direct training in the urban-scale design processes they found themselves tasked to complete. For half a century, the Planning Schools Movement was small and limited to the major industrial countries, but by the late 1960s there were schools on all continents and enrolments were in the thousands. Growth had been fueled by Keynesian government economic interventions, responses to urban unrest, and a growing environmental movement. Schools struggled to find capable faculty to address an ever-widening breadth of planning specialisations, and ties to planning practice were stressed. Then, under pressures from a Reagan-Thatcher economic regime that questioned government's potential to redress urban problems, and national pressures to adapt university professional education to scientific models, many planning schools re invented themselves, often in the mould of the applied social sciences, with emphases on knowledge creation and dissemination. New markets for students, graduates and research products were eagerly embraced, sometimes with little attention paid to the appropriateness or efficacy of the old tools to the new applications. This evolution, in which schools seized opportunity where it lay and sought continuation and growth in opportunistic or even defensive ways, was described as 'the unplanned paths of planning schools' by William Alonso (1986).