Without vision no transition: exploring the potential of planning design studios

Representations of the future – plans, visions, scenarios – guide us in taking
complex decisions in the present. In our current day and age, we face multiple
societal challenges, for example, climate, ecology, and social exclusion. This
makes long-term thinking more relevant than ever. However, this core idea
of spatial planning as a future-oriented discipline seems to have been eroding
over the years. We teach our students to critically assess what is and not so
much what could be or should be. The educational format of planning design
studios trains long-term thinking and students' imaginative capabilities in
an experiential, real-life setting. In this contribution, we evaluate 25 years
of planning studios at Utrecht University. This essay reviews the history and
discusses adaptations in course design and -objectives, student involvement
and -experience, and teachers’ evaluations over the years. We position these
empirical impressions against a brief comparison of the ‘Utrecht model’ with
studio exercises at planning schools of other Dutch universities. We discuss
whether planning studios as a form of real-life, experiential learning still
succeed in triggering the long-term thinking abilities of students. We scrutinize
to what extent students are still capable of thinking so far ahead and summarize
both the bottlenecks and enablers for an educational environment in which
long-term thinking can flourish. We suggest that the biggest challenge to
fostering long-term thinking is not so much the potential of studios but rather
their decreasing importance as an integrative course in the curriculum design,
which may limit the efficiency of training the futures literacy of planning
students.