Educating for Real

Emerging trends in development practice place new demands on planning, engineering and building design. Changes in global political and economic systems, rapid demographic changes, protracted ethnic conflict, political and economic reforms all compound already strained national development agendas. Added to these complex issues are the current commitments to the environment, gender, appropriate technology and human well-being. How should education respond? Are today's approaches to research and teaching appropriate to the realities in the field? How best can students be equipped, technically, methodologically, and intellectually? Why study in the 'developed' countries at all? This interdisciplinary selection of 12 essays explores topics central to the education of development professionals; in particular planners, urban designers, engineers, and architects.

Nabeel Hamdi is a consultant with a long experience of urban development issues. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Oxford Brookes University. Hamdi has consulted on participatory action planning and the upgrading of slums in cities to all the major international development agencies, and to charities and NGOs worldwide. He is the author of Housing without Houses (IT Publications, 1995), co-author of Making Micro Plans (IT Publications, 1988) and Action Planning for Cities (John Wiley and Sons, 1997) and editor of the collected volume Educating for Real (IT Publications 1996), and Urban Futures (Practical Action Publications 2005).