Routes to Urban Issues
Project introduction and background information
Universities and municipalities meet around urban challenges and work collaboratively in the city to create rich learning environments for students, course coordinators, and municipalities. Through these collaborations between city and university, (coordinating) lecturers have faster access to authentic issues in their education, municipalities gain access to the university's knowledge network, and students learn to work on real and concrete issues that intrinsically motivate them.
Nevertheless, urban issues are not directly applicable in an educational context. Because of their complexity, multidisciplinarity or political sensitivity, the issues are sometimes difficult to grasp. It is difficult for the stakeholders involved to deal with the uncertainty in urban issues at the start of an educational cooperation.
This project searches for a way to provide guidelines in this process from three perspectives: the student, the course coordinator, and the municipality. The process of designing and delineating urban issues will be analysed in different educational forms within two cooperation programmes of Delft University of Technology, with the Municipality of Delft and AMS Institute.
Results and learnings
- Complexity analysis of urban issues used in TU Delft education in Delft and Amsterdam. This part of the research was published in the International Journal for Sustainability in Higher Education. The article can be downloaded here and an open access version is available in the Delft Repository.
- Additionally, during the research we build a roadmap, based on various practical experiences from these two collaborations in Delft and Amsterdam, to give teachers and stakeholders insight and guidance in defining urban issues suitable for education.
