8 New Horizons for Planning Education in the former Soviet Republics

Abstract

AESOP – Association of European Schools of Planning – has become an important international network of planning schools, mostly in Western Europe. Since 1990, the integration of East European planning schools has become a major issue on the AESOP agenda. The next AESOP Congress (July 1993) will take place in Łódź, Poland. The membership of East European planning schools is growing and the contacts are being intensified. This is partly a result of a survey on planning schools in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, which is reported in AESOP Paper 7 (May 1992). Recently, the call for AESOP assistance has come especially from the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and several former Soviet Republics. Contacts between these states and European planning schools have been established sporadically (e.g. with some Nordic schools of planning) and are based on personal networking. This first inventory of planning schools was carried out in the perspective of a more structural and comprehensive network. The objective of this report is to stimulate different forms of assistance and exchange between European planning schools and planning schools in the former Soviet Union. Because of the limited time and resources, this inventory cannot be presented as being complete. Communication with the former Soviet Republics is improving but still rather slow. Obviously, the information here included is partial, but to our best knowledge it should be correct. We hope that with this report we open one more way for a closer collaboration with planning schools all over the Eastern region of Europe and, above all, that there will be a follow-up of this first initiative. The challenge for AESOP, and in particular for the Secretary for International Affairs of AESOP, is to continue this work, for it is an unfinished task.