The state of the art: New Zealand planners reflect on education, capabilities, and confronting the future

What are the main challenges which New Zealand planners identify for the future and how do they view their preparedness to address them? The quality of public debate on key issues? What is the role of universities in imparting the skills and research base required? And how best to inspire a future generation of planners? Responses to such lines of inquiry are documented here from a small cohort of NZ-based practitioners and academics contributed as part of a broader on-line survey of planners undertaken in late 2015-early 2016. A stimulus for the study was a survey of attitudes of European academics and practitioners undertaken by Klaus Kunzmann and Martina Koll-Schretzenmayr in 2015. We asked a mix of open and 'closed' questions attracting over 250 respondents across Australia and New Zealand although only two-thirds completed all questions. About 10% of total respondents unequivocally identified as NZ-based and this paper provides an overview of the survey results for this cohort. The specific topics revolve around identifying the grand challenges for planning, the planning skill-set required to address them, improving relationships between the worlds of practice and academia, promoting planning as a profession, the quality of public debate on planning issues, and the state of planning education. While the number of respondents is modest, key and sobering insights are obtained into the collective confidence of the NZ planning profession in positively shaping future environments.