Toward Human–AI Complementarity in Planning Education: Observations from China

Planning education in China faces cognitive overload, resource inequality, and limited personalized practice. This paper proposes a New Educational Technology System (NETS) that reallocates pedagogical labor between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence based on comparative cognitive advantage. We validate NETS through the Virtual Teaching and Research Section for Territorial Spatial Planning (VTRS-TSP), a consortium of seventy-three Chinese universities. Using mixed methods, including student surveys and instructor interviews, we find that AI-augmented workflows significantly improve efficiency and interdisciplinary knowledge synthesis while preserving human primacy in creative and ethical deliberation. NETS offers a scalable, transferable framework for human-AI complementarity in planning education.