Planners recognised for academic excellence
Planning colleagues were part of a winning team at this year’s Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Awards for Research Excellence.
29 September 2025
Professor Geoff Vigar, Dr Abigail Schoneboom and Dr Zan Gunn are part of the team of co-authors in receipt of The Patsy Healey Award for Academic Excellence.
This award forms one of the RTPI Awards for Research Excellence – an opportunity to celebrate leading research across the planning community.
This year’s awards were presented at a ceremony in Belfast on 10 September during the 2025 UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference hosted by Ulster University.
Our colleagues were part of a team of seven co-authors who were recognised for their recent publication, The Future for Planners. The book explores the changing environment for planners in the following context:
Spatial planning is at a crossroads, with government reform undermining the traditional vision of state-employed planners making decisions about development in a unified public interest.
Half of UK planners are now employed in the private sector, with complex inter-relations between the sectors including supplying outsourced services to local authorities struggling with budget cuts.
Drawing on new empirical data from a major research project, ‘Working in the Public Interest’, this book reveals what it's like to be a UK planner in the early 21st century, and how the profession can fulfil its potential for the benefit of society and the environment.
This is the first year that this prize has been named after Professor Emeritus Patsy Healey. Patsy was not only one of the world’s leading planning scholars but also a friend and mentor to many at Newcastle University. She acknowledged that planning work will always be difficult and contested because it attempts to “manage our coexistence in shared space”.
Such a summation seems especially apt at this moment in Britain where debates about the future of communities - and who and who does not belong in them - are especially antagonistic, but where there still exist professional communities concerned for, and skilled in, such management.
Congratulations also go to alumna, Hannah Galvin, who was a finalist in ‘The Student Dissertation Award’ category for her study ‘The Big Plan Theory: Exploring possibilities for podcasting in planning participation’.