Enabling sustainable transformations through place-based urban design education

Abstract

Global climate change influences on human settlements, create a new context and change the purpose of urban design education. It requires not only new urban design knowledge and skills, but most of all, it implies a different way of understanding the future of cities and, crucially, capabilities to shape it through immediate practical action. Education is recognized as the main leverage of this necessary professional and mindset capabilities shift. Therefore, academic architectural education started to evolve, searching for more effective educational methods and techniques. Future urban designers capable of enabling sustainable urban transformations should be prepared to cope with many uncertainties in a co-creative and integrating manner, in which resilience, adaptation and innovation, are becoming the keywords. In this paper, we present and discuss the outcomes of the education model developed under the integral theoretical framework of place-based education, applied at the bachelor's and master academic level at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture over the last seven years. We argue that urban design education aimed to produce effective local responses to climate challenges needs to be learned through realistic problem-solving and in contact with stakeholders. The results indicate that this education model provides not only new professional competencies profile but also creates a niche of innovation that indirectly influences the building up of local social capital necessary to enable sustainable urban transformations.