About Master SPRING
SPRING attracts students and early career planners from across the globe who are interested in an international and comparative perspective on planning with a focus on the global South. SPRING provides students with the unique opportunity to share and enlarge their multiple perspectives on urban and regional planning practice, systems and approaches as well as the related fields of housing, infrastructure systems and land management.
The SPRING program combines teaching in urban and regional planning as well as related fields of housing, infrastructure and land management with field studies aimed at elaborating urban and regional plans in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Employing a postcolonial lens on spatial planning, SPRING enables students to understand planning as an activity that is context dependent and place-specific. Furthermore, SPRING students acknowledge the broad range of planning systems and approaches globally, as well as multiple everyday practices of city-making. They are able to reflect on existing urban and regional planning systems and approaches as well as informal practices in a comparative manner. Based on this, they are able to manage participatory processes and devise planning strategies and concepts that are scientifically sound, locally adapted and future oriented.
The SPRING program provides students with the following set of competences:
• To understand concepts, strategies and practices of urban and regional planning, and to critically reflect on their transferability to other places based on postcolonial planning approaches;
• To critically assess planning processes against the backdrop of globalisation, rapid urbanisation and climate change;
• To translate the needs of target groups - differentiated by gender, age and socio-economic situation - into spatial plans, projects and programmes;
• To draw up spatial plans and shape policies on the basis of comprehensive knowledge in the fields of land management, housing, and infrastructure systems;
• To understand the practices of everyday city-making and incorporate them into planning processes.
SPRING graduates have been very successful in gaining employment in private and public sector positions across the globe example in central, regional or local government offices, NGOs and international organisations. 827 graduates from 77 countries have completed the program so far. Many SPRING graduates hold leading positions in such diverse fields as teaching and research, regional development and urban planning as well as in national ministries and in the development sector. Due to its outstanding performance the SPRING programmed received an award as one of the top 10 international Master degree programmed offered by German universities in 2006.
The Department of Spatial Planning at the University of Dortmund and the Department of Planning at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, launched the SPRING program in 1984. When the Asian Institute of Technology joined in 1989, SPRING expanded into a multilateral network. AIT was replaced in 1995 by the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of the Philippines. With the University College of Lands and Architectural Studies (UCLAS) in Tanzania, another African partner joined the network in 2002, extending the focus of the curriculum to urban planning and management. UCLAS meanwhile became an independent tertiary institution, the Ardhi University. In 2006, the SPRING network expanded to South America. The Universidad Austral de Chile complemented the program with a new focus on environmental economics in planning. Since 2020, the Universidade Federal do ABC in Brazil enriches the network with its special study focus on planning, governance and public policy for sustainable urban agglomeration. First accredited in 2007, the SPRING program regularly undergoes evaluations conducted by certified accreditation agencies (in 2012, 2019 and 2026).
SPRING Contact
TU Dortmund University
Department of Spatial Planning
SPRING
August-Schmidt-Straße 10
44227 Dortmund
Germany
Visiting hours
E-Mail
General: spring@tu-dortmund.de
Application: application.spring@tu-dortmund.de
Instagram: spring_tu.dortmund
LinkedIn: MSc SPRING
Phone: +49 231 755-6075