PREFACE

The student editors of this volume have honored me by the request to write the Preface to this collection of lectures, commentary, notes, and background materials offered under the name of Trading Places. Modest and semi-informal though it may be, the collection is nevertheless presented with high ambitions. It is intended as the opening salvo of a low-key but sustainable campaign to give university students woldwide who are now preparing to enter the planning profession, an effective voice in shaping the emerging concerns and objectives of that profession.

Planning is affected, more drastically than most other lines of professional work, by the market forces of globalization. While associations of practicing planners in many countries still operate within horizons defined by the domestic problems and legal frameworks of the past -- for example, in setting credentialization requirements -- it will be the young people in the profession who will have to live with the consequences. They will be around, and they will be the ones to cope with the shifting balance between nationally based planning policies and international market forces at a time when many of today's planning practitioners will have retired or departed. It will fall to them to help establish democratically structured policies that set social limits to the operation of international market forces and corporate networks, a task that calls for international planning action. Thus it is not only fair but elementary good sense that the students' voice be heard.

Nor should it be surprising, for the same reason, that planning students are at the forefront of pushing the profession in the international direction demanded by globalization. Trading Places, established at the Urban Planning Department of Columbia University, is a transatlantic offshoot of PlaNet, the European student planning network that has been in operation since 1996. PlaNet, with a website at <www.planningnetwork.org>, today has fifteen local groups established at European universities in seven countries, plus the group at Columbia since the Fall of 1999, the first associated group in the United States. PlaNet's international program of conferences focuses directly on globalization, with emphasis on three key topics: general aspects, mega-projects, and sustainability.

The program of the group at Columbia University started off with an emphasis on comparing and contrasting U.S. and European planning experiences. Hence the name of "Trading Places," which is the designation of a four-week U.S.-European student exchange trip and travelling conference organized for the Summer of 2000, s well as the title of the present collection of documents which resulted from that exchange trip. Plans are now being drawn up for repeating this project, with a different set of places and planning experiences/challenges to be visited on both sides of the Atlantic.

Beyond this, the Columbia group has put out feelers to Cornell University in upstate New York and to York Universdity, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Toronto in Canada, with a view to catalyzing the formation of new local groups associated with PlaNet. Such an expansion of the network is, however, much harder to achieve than in Europe, because the training of planners in Europe stretches over five years of post-Baccalaureate university education, while in the U.S. and Canada it is compressed into two years at the Master's level. As a result, planning students on this side of the Atlantic are overloaded and hardly have any time to devote to the activities of student organizations. Moreover, their curricula are weighed down by a surfeit of required courses that all focus on domestic planning problems, leaving little time even for elective courses with an international emphasis.

Despite these impediments, one half of an exchange trip between planning students at Columbia and Cornell universities has already been undertaken before Thanksgiving in 2000, the other half is about to take place early in 2001. Cornell students have made it clear that, if they are to join the network, their interests demand the expansion of transatlantic activities to include the Third World. This represents a first, highly welcome, stirring in the direction of true globalization of the international student planning network.

PlaNet and Trading Places have come into being as essential components of a widespread and growing reaction against the hubris of market-based, corporate-implemented globalization that threatens to overrun all community values, including democratic decisionmaking about the future. This kind of globalization is seen by more and more people as leading to increasingly intolerable economic and social polarization within individual societies as well as among different societies worldwide. Yet, as planners we can be easily infected with a different kind of hubris, namely the notion that as members of a professional elite, small groups of us can have both the information and the judgment needed to guide societies reliably into the future. Young people have the wisdom to be aware of both kinds of hubris, and to guard against them. Those of us who are old planners had better have the wisdom to listen to the young, because the future belongs to them much more than to us. We ask many unresolved questions about a fast-changing world; they will have to provide the answers. Last Summer's U.S.-European exchange of planning students which produced this volume has been an early initiative to move in the direction of these answers.

Thomas Vietorisz