Place-based urban design education for adapting cities to climate change

Abstract

Climate change and its impact on human settlements create a new context and purpose of urban design education. It asks for new knowledge and skills, but most of all it changes the way in which we think about the future of cities and about our capabilities to shape it. Future urban designers should be prepared to work in the world they can’t totally control, in which resilience and adaptation are becoming the key words. We argue that this shift in the mind-set and professional capabilities cannot be done in one single urban design class or studio (nor only in the field of urban design as part of architectural education), but needs continual and evolving development of knowledge and skills, as well as possibilities to explore different learning and design approaches. At the same time, though climate change is a global problem, it needs local and place-based responses if urban resilience is to be achieved and sustained.In this paper we presenttwo models of urban design education and discuss their capacity to integrate climate adaptation issues into the process of architectural education. These educational models were developed at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture for two different levels of higher education, at bachelor (“Sustainable urbancommunities studio”) and master of architecture (“Ecological urban design studio”) levels. Both models were developed under the theoretical framework of place-based education, but apply it in different ways in relation to purpose, focus, methods and expected learning achievement.