The Place of Technological Innovation in Urban Planning Pedagogy and Practice in Nigeria

With the world becoming a ‘global village’, African cities, their residents, and those who attempt to plan for them, as AbdouMaliq Simone (2001, p. 17) aptly put it, are now “forced to operate with a more totalising sense of sense of exteriority”. Compelled by two pervasive global forces of globalisation and technological advancement, the way we perceive and experience the world, our approaches to learning, and our activity systems are changing irreversibly. Amidst these ground-shifting changes, the current paper attempts to assess the place of technological innovations in planning knowledge and skill transfer in Nigeria with a view to exploring their various contributions to urban planning education and practice. Evidence abound that with the advent of information and communications technology (ICT) in the country, and open access software are facilitating technology-driven applications in data collection and analysis, design, visualisation and decision-making by aspiring planning students, researchers and practitioners with improved performance and outcome. Many challenges, however, remain in the optimum utilisation of these technological innovations in the Nigerian planning system.