Mapping China: Urbanisation - 9 The City Planners, Designers and Decision-Makers: The Training and Certificate System for Planners

Urban planning education in China started under the architecture and civil engineering departments of universities during the 1930s and went through manifold changes throughout the decades. An abundant number of urban planners have been trained. Today there are more than 110,000 planners serving in a variety of planning offices (Zhang Tingwei, 2015[J1] ). But still, as urbanization continues its course in China and transformation takes place at all levels, the need for well-informed and experienced planners in China is bulging.

Urban planning educational programmes increased tremendously during the first years of the new millennium. Now China has the world’s largest educational capacity for urban planning. Most of the planning programmes are sheltered in the same college with architecture or civil engineering programmes, such as in Tongji University in Shanghai and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Some are set up under the College of Geography, such as in Nanjing University. Some enjoy independent programmes for urban planning, like in Beijing University, while in People’s University in Beijing, it is under the College of Public Administration.

Trained as a professional urban planner, practicing for a certain numbers of years in the field of planning, planners are then qualified to seek national certification through a test system. In order to obtain initial certification, a candidate needs to pass tests on four subject matters that cover the theories, regulations as well as practical knowledge of urban planning. Only certified planners are qualified to lead planning projects at certain levels, such as new town planning, governmental projects, private-public partnership projects, etc.

When evaluating the capability of a planning institute, the number of certified planners it employs is regarded as an important indicator. Project experiences and other factors are also considered for the grading of these entities. Only a limited number of institutes are certified as Class-I urban planning units, and thus capable of carrying out public planning projects. These institutes can be categorised by their organisational domains. Here’s a list of the categories and a few examples.