In Latin America and the Caribbean, cities have been planned since long before any academic program bearing that name existed. Professional practice precedes the curriculum: urban planners are trained at the intersection of disciplines, where regulation and informality, the academic and the communal, are in constant dialogue.
There is a significant asymmetry between research production on Latin American urbanism and that which exists on its teaching. This gap becomes relevant when the region faces demands that exceed inherited curricular frameworks. Global competency frameworks were built from specific contexts, and the operationalizations that Latin American programs have developed –from structural informality, citizen participation as a constitutional mandate, plural epistemologies as a legitimate technical method– have their own place in international dialogue.
Thinking about this training requires returning to three largely unresolved questions: what kind of professional do we want to train, what qualities should they have, and how do they learn? This symposium understands training not as the transmission of stable knowledge but as ongoing innovation upon a tradition that continually revises itself.
Theme 1. The question of profile: contemporary training in light of Latin America’s urban challenges.
Every curriculum responds, explicitly or implicitly, to an idea of for what city and for what society a professional is trained. Comparative research has identified competencies that Latin American programs have rigorously developed and that global frameworks have yet to name with precision: planning with informality rather than against it; mastering redistributive land instruments; mediating participatory processes under conflict and structural inequality; integrating indigenous, Afro-descendant, and popular knowledge as a legitimate technical method; navigating institutions of varying state capacity; planning in territories of post-conflict and forced displacement; and critically reading imported urban models. These competencies are present in global frameworks, but their definitions do not capture how Latin America enacts them or how they can be enriched from regional specificity.
Theme 2. Situated pedagogies: the city as a space for learning and the dialogue of knowledges.
We call for teaching experiences that lead students to learn from the city and not only about it: experiential methodologies, participatory strategies, pedagogical mediation in contexts of conflict, integration of non-academic knowledge as a legitimate method, and new technologies within these situated pedagogies. The dialogue of knowledges is not merely a declarative principle: it is a curricular practice that deserves systematic documentation.
Theme 3. The ecological crisis and the center-periphery gap as curricular content.
The ecological crisis is often thought of from the perspective of the city, leaving rurality aside –a gap that isolates entire communities from planning and from the training that should address them. Experiences that integrate ecological, landscape, and territorial dimensions as structural content are of interest; contributions of sustainability models for rural realities; and their contribution to global frameworks on training in environmental planning.
We invite papers documenting experiences, research, or curricular proposals for rethinking education in urbanism and planning from Latin America and the Caribbean.
