Teaching a global urbanism and planning: lessons from comparative and contextual pedagogical practice

Can planning move beyond Eurocentric models to ground knowledge in diverse, decolonising contexts and advance a genuinely global urbanism that links local experience to shared transnational challenges? Through two case examples of core courses taught in most planning curricula (introduction to planning practice and urban theory) and their associated pedagogical practices, this article sets out key arguments that re-emphasise the need to decolonise planning education and to create a more context-sensitive and experiential approach. We underscore the necessity of operationalising context, comparativism and practice/lived experience to decolonise planning education, and argue that key principles are rooted not in abstract ideals and theories but in an understanding of knowledge creation as situated and bounded, and of theorising as a grounded practice. Finally, we propose a set of principles that focus on students’ developing professional competencies as well as on the intellectual agility to address the fractured realities of the twenty-first-century city by learning to navigate the tensions between context and comparison, form and informality, as well as theory and lived experience.