Democratizing Urban Planning Education: Creating Place Value in Ukraine’s Planning Programs

Planners sit at the heart of a “democratic paradox”: they shape and enforce policies governing a contested common good – land – balancing individual rights against collective decision-making. In a context of “democratic backsliding” and the erosion of the Western rules-based order, epitomized by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the planner’s role as an arbiter of land rights and facilitator of collective action is increasingly precarious. The full-scale invasion has forced a fundamental reorientation of Ukrainian planning education, driven by the demands of post-war reconstruction and alignment with European Union planning practice. This study asks whether Ukrainian planning education has moved beyond the path dependency of its Soviet and pre-Soviet “city-building” tradition toward a curriculum oriented to creating place value. Applying Kirlin’s framework – creating place value and governing complex functional systems – we conducted a qualitative content analysis of the required-course syllabi of six Ukrainian graduate planning programs, translated from Ukrainian into English, with a seventh, newly launched program examined as a supplementary case. Findings show that newer and economics- or governance-rooted programs articulate place value and cross-sectoral coordination most explicitly, while engineering- and architecture-rooted programs remain anchored in the technical and rule-of-law framings inherited from the technocratic Soviet model. We conclude by considering how Ukrainian planning education can best serve post-war reconstruction while advancing democratic professionalization.