This paper seeks to reflect on recent developments in higher education for planning sustainable cities and to draw out the insights from relevant literature emerging from the underexplored interface of the geographies of higher education and policy mobilities. It emerges from an informal review of our own institution's marketing, coordination and monitoring of sustainable cities-relevant programmes and a systematic review of similar programmes offered globally. This we present as a critical provocation responding to a key pedagogical challenge of sustainable cities education, that of promoting mobile knowledge and/or situated learning. We conclude by offering three possibilities for how higher education programme developers might embrace and operationalise this creative tension