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Transportation is a broad sector, encompassing many sub-sectors such as freight logistics, traffic engineering and network management, air transport, passenger transport, transport policy, and development planning. "Transportation Planner" is a generic job title for a practitioner who is responsible for the day to day planning and delivery of programmes and infrastructure across the many sub-sectors of transportation.

Planning by its nature is concerned with shaping the future. It is a future-orientated activity and historically town planning practitioners were concerned with shaping the physical environment in a way that is consistent with their ideologies. More recently, town planners have moved away from looking in the rear-view mirror and have embraced spatial approaches, which entails the coordination of issues, practices and policies specific to a place.

While eminent scientific organizations such as the Royal Society have been around since the 1600s, many Caribbean countries only gained their independence within the last 100 years. So what does this mean for scientific and technical discourse and development within the Caribbean? Furthermore what are the platforms to enable this to develop within the region?