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.
Objective and expected outcomes
The goal is to build a roadmap, based on various practical experiences from these two collaborations, to give stakeholders insight and guidance in defining urban issues suitable for education.
Expected outcomes
- Complexity analysis of urban issues used in TU Delft education in Delft and Amsterdam
- Journey maps of processes to shape and negotiate urban issues in TU Delft education in Delft and Amsterdam
- Roadmap to serve as tool for students, course coordinators, and municipalities to offer guidance at the start of an educational collaboration
- Workshop on Living Lab Summit 2021 at AMS Institute
Results and learnings
The kick-off of the research project is August 2020. As soon as there are lessons learned, we will be sharing them with the 4TU.CEE community.