Development Planning Unit

The Development Planning Unit (DPU) is an international centre specialising in academic teaching, practical training, research and consultancy in the field of urban and regional development, planning, and management. It is concerned with promoting sustainable forms of development, understanding rapid urbanisation and encouraging innovation in the policy, planning and management responses to the economic, social and environmental development of cities and regions, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The central purpose of the DPU is to strengthen the professional and institutional capacity of governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to deal with the wide range of issues that are emerging at all levels. The DPU's multi-disciplinary and multi-national staff offer specialised courses both in London and abroad for the staff of central government departments, local authorities, NGOs and the private sector. These courses are supported by international agencies as well as by national and provincial governments.

The academic staff of the DPU is a multi-disciplinary group of 17 professionals and academics (embracing eleven different nationalities), all with extensive and on-going research and professional experience in various fields of urban and institutional development throughout the world. The DPU Associates is a body of professionals who work closely with the Unit both in London and overseas.

The University of London and UCL

UCL (University College London) was founded in 1826 as the first secular institution of higher learning in England. Thus, it is the oldest and the largest of the 23 major institutions that consitute the federal University of London. UCL ranks with Oxford and Cambridge in the top three multi-faculty research universities in the United Kingdom. It has 70 academic departments with over 16,000 students of whom 6,000 are postgraduates and 5,000 are from overseas (130 different countires).

The Faculty of the Built Environment

The Faculty of the Built Environment consists of The Bartlett Schools of Architecture, Environmental Design, Construction, Planning and the Development Planning Unit. The Bartlett is the largest and oldest multi-disciplinary school of the built environment in the United Kingdom. It has some 1,000 students of whom more than half are postgraduates.
Link to the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment

The Architecture Association

In 1953 a conference was in University College London on architecture and planning in the tropical developing countries of the South. The deliberations of many widely experienced practitioners at the conference concentrated on the extent to which architectural and planning education in the North (and much of it in the South as well) did not address the climatic and social issues of developing countries. The conference called for the establishment of a training programme to address these issues. In response, in 1954 the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London launched an annual six-month postgraduate course in tropical architecture. For two years this was led by the renowned architect-planner Maxwell Fry before being taken over and developed by Otto Koenigsberger, former Chief Architect to the Indian State of Mysore and Director of Housing of the first independent Government of India.

Over the following decade the course, which attracted architects and planners from throughout the developing countries as well as British professionals working in the Commonwealth, developed and changed in response to the rapidly changing scene in the developing towns and cities of the South. The initial emphasis on building physics and climatic design for tropical conditions gave way to the need for new approaches to planning and social development for rapid urbanisation. Technical training was replaced by the education of policy makers, which, in turn, was superseded by concerns for new participatory approaches to the implementation of policy. In recognition of these shifts, the programme changed its name from Tropical Architecture to Tropical Studies, then in 1968 to Development and Tropical Studies. (see Wakely, P., The Development of a School, Habitat International, Vol.7, No.5/6, London 1983).

University College London

In 1971 the Department moved from the Architectural Association to University College London (UCL), changing its name to The Development Planning Unit (DPU) and Koenigsberger became the first University of London Professor of Urban Development. Since then the DPU has continued to change and develop in response to the needs of developing country governments, city administrations, civil society organisations and the international community. The DPU Masters Degree programme was started in 1978; a highly successful programme of specialist professional short courses in a range of urban development issues was run throughout the 1980s and early 1990s; the Doctoral Research (PhD) programme took off in the mid 1980s; and the Unit's consultancy and applied research activities have grown consistently.

Fifty years after opening its doors to the first postgraduate course in 1954, the DPU enjoys a widely respected international reputation as one of the world's leading capacity building institutions in the field of urban and regional development.