Abstract
Planning education in Bangladesh is relatively speaking a recent development and provision is very limited. Only seven public universities have planning schools. While all provide undergraduate programs, only three offer postgraduate programs including opportunities to study for a PhD. The curricula of these planning programs are all very similar with only slight variations between the different institutions. Bangladesh’s undergraduate programs in planning are comparatively good and offer standards that are similar to planning schools in Europe or North America; however, postgraduate and research degrees are struggling. With a few exceptions, faculty members of planning schools hold Master degrees; however, less than half of faculty members currently hold PhD which are mainly from universities in Europe, Japan, and the USA. Thence, a large portion of teachers is presently on leave for higher studies or research creating a severe shortage of qualified faculty. As of 2016, about 1,950 planners had graduated from planning schools in Bangladesh. Even for this relatively low number of graduates, the job market is saturated and many graduate planners are working in non-planning fields or have migrated abroad. This is clearly an underutilization of resources.
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Notes
- 1.
Planning in this chapter refers to the professional activity related to development planning as well as planning for sociophysical environment of urban/rural/regional areas; it includes different specialized branches of spatial planning such as town and country planning, regional planning, environmental planning.
- 2.
Established as the Department of Physical Planning in 1962 (and subsequently changed to the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in 1976), but the academic program began in 1969. Initially the department offered the Master of Physical Planning (MPP) but later changed to the MURP degree and subsequently the syllabus has been changed to meet the changing needs and the prevailing conditions of the country (Rahman 1990).
References
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URPD-KU (2016) Website of the Urban and Rural Planning Discipline, Khulna University (KU). http://www.ku.ac.bd. Accessed 26 Aug 2016
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Rahman, M.S.U. (2018). Planning Education in Bangladesh. In: Frank, A., Silver, C. (eds) Urban Planning Education. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55967-4_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55967-4_14
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