Planning Thoughts – The evolution of themes in Master Dissertations and Doctoral Theses in the field of specialisation in Spatial Planning, FEUP

The formal existence of a specialisation in spatial planning at FEUP dates back 50 years. The present paper aims to contribute to the analysis of this experience, and to some extent of its contributions, by tracing the evolution of the themes of MSc dissertations and PhD thesis. under the scope of the different spatial planning specialisation courses. After a brief contextualisation, which refers to changes in higher education in Portugal and in FEUP, the paper answers two research questions: How did the themes of Master Dissertations and Doctoral Theses in Spatial Planning evolve within this field of specialisation in FEUP? How do the themes in the field of Spatial Planning correlate between themselves? To this end, methodologies of content analysis of metadata, titles, and abstracts (CAMTA) and cluster analysis based on the software VOSviewer were applied. The increasing number of publications and themes, which reflect the consolidation of this field of specialisation, and the permanence of three major research clusters, which are thus a characteristic of the planning approach developed at FEUP, constitute some of the main results of the study.