A professional awareness challenge persists in the urban planning field in North America, resulting from students’ unfamiliarity, parents’ misperceptions, and school counselors’ non-recommendation of the planning profession as a potential career for students. With significant declines in enrollment and diversity in planning programs over the last decade, overcoming this professional awareness challenge is imperative. This paper argues that university planning programs and departments’ steps toward creating the needed platforms via Design and Planning Language Programs to build awareness among youth to pursue planning in their education and as a profession needs to be expanded and consolidated through research.

Many scholars offer alternatives to Global North theories on urban governance, access to socioeconomic opportunities, and informality in the Global South. Yet, these alternative arguments have scarcely been applied to urban greenspace planning. Oftentimes, residents are characterized negatively as the cause of greenspace decline in African cities due to encroachment and/or vandalism. This paper offers an alternative perspective using data on 400 residents from Ghana’s Kumasi Metropolis. It argues that while residents’ place a low emphasis on urban greenspaces, this is indicative of their prioritization and survival strategies of meeting their needs. To simply characterize residents negatively, therefore, ignores the underlying context and reasons for urban greenspace decline and the contestations between residents’ priorities and urban greenspaces in African cities. This paper suggests an appreciation of local context to integrate residents’ needs and survival strategies into urban greenspace planning in African cities and the Global South in general.

Planning education has a responsibility to provide students with theoretical and practical training to address real-world issues. This study explores studio teaching as an engaged pedagogy, incorporating interdisciplinary approaches to education for sustainable development (ESD) and themes from the American Planning Association’s (APA) Future Trend reports. Focusing on two senior capstone projects at the University of Cincinnati involving 34 students, the study emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary methods and APA trend integration in fostering critical thinking and higher-order reasoning. Capstone projects show students’ active engagement with innovative planning concepts (e.g., climate migration, innovative ways of goods’ delivery, and expanding third place’s concept). Such active and innovative learning outcomes not only deepen students’ understanding of urban planning but also equip them with critical cognitive and professional skills, which are necessary as professional planners as well as forward thinkers. The experiences and findings presented can help other programs articulate the benefits of studio-based courses. The findings offer experience-based guidance for similar initiatives in planning studios globally and support the ongoing transformation of sustainability education to prepare students for complex, real-world problem-solving.

A youth-centric participatory mapping approach was employed to monitor the lower Mill Creek, an urban waterway located in Cincinnati, Ohio, by collecting geospatial data points on surface water quality and ecological assets. Utilizing the ArcGIS Field Maps application, a digital survey-based tool was developed to identify key areas related to ecological assets and urban water management challenges. The purpose of this citizen science approach was to allow researchers to capture and understand community perspectives and insights while engaging in scientific research that focuses on identifying geographic vulnerability areas and ecological assets. The primary objective was to empower local community groups and residents in an environmental justice neighborhood to understand the current opportunities and constraints of the adjacent waterbody, enabling informed decision-making for future planning initiatives that benefit both conservation and remediation efforts aligned with local values and needs. A youth-centric participatory mapping approach was employed to monitor the lower Mill Creek, an urban waterway in Cincinnati, Ohio, through the collection of geospatial data on surface water quality and ecological assets. The findings, based on hotspot analysis, revealed significant spatial clustering of heavy debris near the barrier dam and the lower portion of Mill Creek, where it converges with the Ohio River. This accumulation is attributed to the structural features of the barrier dam’s inner flood catchment area, which traps debris during rainfall events. Although no areas showed spatial significance for perceived ecological services, students identified specific areas with esthetic and biodiversity value, particularly at Mill Creek’s confluence with the Ohio River and along the northern stretch of the stream corridor. These findings provide valuable insights for guiding future conservation and remediation efforts that reflect both community values and environmental priorities.

Fifty years has passed since the publication of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature. With “confident skill,” a quality that Mumford attributed to McHarg in the book’s Introduction, the text intermingled autobiographical notes and philosophical thoughts with chapters on ecological planning case studies and the use of the map overlay technique. Design with Nature provided limited indications about the authors or books that inspired and supported McHarg. The paper, through a literature review, investigates the contingent circumstances that fed the social milieu of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the individuals and ideas preceding or contemporary with McHarg that backed, validated, or substantiated his book and ecological planning. The paper considers the multiple influences that McHarg gathered from scientists and philosophers in the time preceding the preparation of Design with Nature when he created and led his Man and the Environment course and hosted The House We Live In, a CBS television show. It also reflects the multiple ways in which McHarg’s ideas influenced, and were influenced in return, by the development of academic ecology practice and education. McHarg recognized that the book borrowed from the thoughts and dreams of others and that his intention was to divulge his ideas to a wider audience than just academic insiders. The paper affirms that Design with Nature and its author catalyzed social, cultural, scholarly, and professional factors, started a chain reaction that had an undeniable impact on academia, practice, and government in the 50 years afterward, and became a central and fundamental academic reference for landscape architecture and planning.