Educating for Real. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Jim Antoniou

Billions are spent annually on development by multilateral and bilateral donors such as Britain. An abundance of data is gathered, leading to elitist knowledge in a quest for originality. Yet, little benefit is felt by the low income majority in developing countries. In fact, the situation is worse, not better.

One reason is that too many professionals are ill prepared for the tasks ahead, while academic agendas are divorced from urban realities. As Nabeel Hamdi points out in this book, '...the gap between what we teach inside universities and what we actually need outside in order to be effective is widening'. Expert know-how is more highly valued than indigenous knowledge.

The emphasis on education for the built environment in developing countries has shifted from construction technology to Planning, economics and urbanisation policies. Too many courses deal with issues at a scale which conveniently avoids physical design.

The subject of this book is the training of professionals for development practice. What we need, says Hamdi, is '... to encourage students with their assessment of what is best to be linked to what is mostly likely to work (which is often less than best as taught in schools)'. The more one delves into the way northern universities educate and train people for the south, the more the problems are multiplied, as in a Fibonacci sequence.

Although not every contributor writes as well as Hamdi, this is an important book, offering practical ideas for developing relationships between somewhat elitist universities, mainly in the West, and those in poor countries.

JIM ANTONIOU