THE COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING DISCIPLINE EDUCATION SYSTEMS: FOCUSING ON STUDIO EDUCATION

City and regional planning is a complex scientific era where different scientific fields as social and natural sciences interact with each other. Planning is an open system, it couldn’t be taken into account separately from external influences, it cannot be isolated where outside factors are neutralized and it is not one mechanism operating alone and it is affected by other mechanisms. Therefore, planning education system can change from one country to another or even from one university to another in the same country. Different methods and courses can have impacts on the skills of planners who graduate from those universities.In this respect, the aim of this study is to analyse undergraduate education system of city and regional planning department by focusing on studio education. Accordingly, Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and University of North Carolina, USA are chosen to be comparatively examined. In this regard, in the first part, the general education system of planning in these universities will be figured out by analysing their curriculums. In the second part, studio education, where planning and design activities at different scales are conducted and the output of different courses are integrated, will be analyzed with respect to course syllabuses and studio outputs if possible. In the third part, the comparison between those universities in terms of general education system and studio learning process will be carried out to be discussed and finally the question of how planning education could be developed in changing globalized world conditions will be discussed