Jonathan Holmsten is taking the final year of the Strategic Urban and Regional Planning programme. He has lived in Linköping all his life, and took the Urban and Regional Planning programme at LiU between 2017 and 2020, meaning that he was member of the first year group to take the programme.
Why did you apply to the Strategic Urban and Regional Planning programme?
I wanted an opportunity to study in depth how urban and regional planning can be used in the long term to work towards positive societal development.
What does the international nature of the programme mean to you?
Not only is everything on the programme in English, many of the cases we have studied have had an international character. The structure has in general been quite flexible, so we could adapt the tasks according to our own preferences. For example, we took a course in climate adaptation in cities, where we chose to look at cities in Africa, North America and Asia. We have also taken a course in regional planning within the EU.
Plans for the future?
I’m reasonably flexible, but I would like to get into something that involves physical planning, such as overview planning, detailed development planning, architectural planning or something similar.
How was the first year of the programme?
It was really exciting to focus on a European and international perspective. It’s been an interesting mix with many topical societal challenges, such as climate adaptation in cities.
I see the internship as a great opportunity for me to gain useful experience of being in the workplace. I’m going to be working at Region Östergötland and will focus on my favourite area – sustainable transport.
Many of the people I talk to find the programme extremely exciting and think that it covers an area that will be very important in the future.