ACSP at 50

As the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2009, it is timely to recount its current activities and assess some of the issues faced by the Association and planning education more broadly. ACSP is a robust organisation. It has 94 full member schools and 20 affiliate member schools from the US and Canada, and 24 corresponding member schools from other countries around the world. Significantly, ACSP is totally volunteer-driven. The faculty and students of the member schools work through a structure of committees, task forces, and interest groups to set priorities, make decisions, and carry out the activities of the Association. ACSP has one regular employee to oversee day-to-day administration and manage the annual conference. ACSP's mission statement describes the Association as a consortium of schools with 'shared commitments to understanding the dynamics of urban and regional development, enhancing planning practices, and improving the education of both novice and experienced planners'. The Association's activities are all designed to support those three goals - to strengthen scholarship in planning, to advance professional planning practice, and to improve planning education. They also define the issues facing the Association. ACSP's two core activities for strengthening planning scholarship are its journal and annual conference. The Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) is now in its 29th year. JPER provides an important venue for the best scholarly work from all the sub-fields of planning, as well as work on planning pedagogy. Faculty of ACSP full member schools receive subscriptions to JPER, as do individual ACSP members. But most important with regard to scholarship are the hundreds of research libraries around the world that subscribe to JPER, in hard copy and/or electronically. Those subscriptions facilitate the intellectual exchange that is critical to the advancement of scholarship. ACSP's annual conference also provides a venue for scholarly work from all the sub-fields of planning, as well as work on planning pedagogy. The conference is organised into 15 tracks, reflecting the range of interests among planning scholars. In recent years, conference registration has exceeded 800, with large numbers of attendees from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Every five years, ACSP and the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) hold a joint congress, which is also the annual conference of each association. These congresses have been remarkably successful in facilitating international scholarly exchanges. They alternate between European and North American sites. The most recent joint congress was in Chicago in 2008, and so the next one will be at a European location in 2013. The success of the AESOP-ACSP joint congresses inspired an even more ambitious effort - the creation of a series of world planning schools congresses (WPSCs), the third one of which is scheduled for 2011. The first WPSC (Shanghai, 2001) saw the development of the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN), a network of nine national and regional associations from around the world. GPEAN has taken on responsibility for the WPSCs. ACSP has been pleased to collaborate with its sister associations in support of GPEAN and the WPSCs. The WPSCs provide yet another opportunity to strengthen scholarship in planning through international exchanges. Finally with respect to strengthening planning scholarship, ACSP has joined forces with its GPEAN partners to produce Dialogues in Urban and Regional Planning, a series of edited volumes consisting of the best articles published by faculty from member schools in each of the world's nine planning school associations. Dialogues, which is published by Taylor and Francis, tries to provide a look into planning scholarship from various perspectives around the world. Turning to the goal of advancing professional planning practice, ACSP is active on two levels. …