The jury received entries from AESOP member schools across a wide geographical range evidencing the ever-growing strength and quality of planning education in Europe. Submissions displayed throughout very high levels of pedagogical quality and in many cases also addressed innovative, future-oriented spatial planning topics. It was a delight and privilege to review the submissions but it also posed a bit of a dilemma to select a winner. It was a very tight race to say the least!
Winners of the 2025 AESOP Prize for Excellence in Teaching are Melanie Lombard and Philipp Horn (School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield, UK) for their module “Urban informality”.
The module on “Urban informality” is open to Master students completing a degree in various ranges and of planning studies. The module addresses informality, its relationship to cities and to public action in terms of development, both, in Northern and Southern contexts, and the Jury felt this kind of mainstreaming was not only relevant but important. Informal practices (e.g. markets, housing, economic activity) are seen as appropriations of space that are often neglected or misunderstood by public action.
Broadly, the module, which brings together students from different allied disciplines and employes a problem-based learning approach. At the crossroads of theoretical and empirical approaches, students are asked to reflect on responses and actions that could provide solutions to issues identified by public players and local communities. Students are asked to engage with different sources (eg films, blogs, visual material, novels), reflect on these and incorporate them into written assignments and case study reports. The pedagogical approach employs an active learning mode (workshops) and seeks to share views on this subject between public players and local communities. We can only encourage other academic institutions to explore these approaches, which can easily be mobilized and find their way into their usual fields of study. Resolutely innovative in the field of planning (from a thematic point of view), a textbook written by teaching staff accompanies this module.
