The Cross Domain City of the Future Graduation Lab, situated in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft, has been a pioneer in experimenting with a multidisciplinary approach to education on the built environment. Drawing upon this expertise over the past years, this book reflects on multidisciplinarity in the built environment and its implementation in education on the built environment. How should one approach multidisciplinarity in education and practice? What encompasses its core elements, benefits, and challenges? By addressing these questions, the book aims to inform students and practitioners within the realm of the built environment by sharing insights from experiences in multidisciplinary education. It presents eight conclusions regarding the future of multidisciplinary education and, thereby, seeks to contribute to a more humane and sustainable future for cities: Process is central to multidisciplinary collaboration. Negotiating positions, ensuring an environment of respect, balance and open-mindedness, and setting a common vocabulary. Multidisciplinarity can be a way to foster innovation. It triggers complementarity and confrontation. As with any innovation, there is potential for greater outcomes, but, at the same time, extra risks emerge. These need to be managed. Multidisciplinarity could be better integrated into organisational structures. Disciplinarity and multidisciplinarity are in mutual coexistence. They are inseparable. They can complement and contradict each other. Problem precedes solution, not the opposite. Framing the problem, or 'problematizing', is a considerable share of the actual solution. This is particularly applicable to multidisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity is by nature composed of fluid boundaries. Navigating through an enormous diversity of perspectives requires agility, flexibility, independence, spirit of adventure and embracing uncertainty. Professionals should be trained as 'T-shape': grounded in their field while able to dialogue with other fields. Both generalists and specialists are needed. Education should provide opportunities for both. ... Read more

At TU Delft, in the interdisciplinary MSc II Design Studio Architecture & Urban Design, students of the master tracks Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment work closely together. The integrative approach of this graduate course setting allows the students to examine urban space as architectural space and architectural space as urban space. Through an experimental design method, developed during the 2018 national research project Stad van de Toekomst,1 the studio is founded on the interest in the intervention in the built environment and its immediate effect on architecture and urban design. The global framework of the Stad van de Toekomst project is directly projected on Amsterdam Sloterdijk Station and Boston South Station areas, compressed and applied to this ten-week graduate course. Taken from a wider angle, the project is motivated by urgent social as well as local tasks in the urban areas, varying from housing demand, social inclusiveness, new economy, climate adaptation, and the like, taking into account the transitions in energy, mobility, circularity, and digitization. This echoes through in the central question of the Stad van de Toekomst project: How can we design and develop a transformation area in an integral way into an attractive and future-proof urban environment? In addition particularly, the project is motivated by the major system transitions impacting on societal tasks effectively desiring progressive urbanization in the first place. ... Read more

As a response to the shift of the centre of urbanisation from the global north to the global south, there is a need to extend the existing knowledge base. Self-made systems (equated with informal settlements) and its complex socio-economic dynamics, especially highlight this gap. In the global south, informal settlements often illustrate a distinct form of entrepreneurialism along with acting as an arrival base for many migrant workers. The theoretical exploration of informal settlements, however still has its base in Euro-American literature, remaining at best exploratory in the global south. Even with the authors hailing from the global south, the foundation of the ideas lie rooted in the urban concepts of the global north.
Locating itself at the cross between the study of socio-economic dynamics in informal settlements and the rise of the global south in urban theory, this research reviews relevant socioeconomic and political concepts or propositions and tests its implications and validity on a selected informal settlement. Dharavi in Mumbai, India forms the testing ground for the propositions, being one of the most prolific informal settlement in Asia. It is particularly known for its entrepreneurial nature along with a dense migrant community, along with its relevance to the surrounding city of Mumbai. The propositions - an ‘arrival city’, an ‘informal economic base’, a site for ‘kinetic urbanism’ are derived from Euro-American theoretical base and bear particular relevance to Dharavi and its socio-economic composition. This testing is executed through detailed spatial
analysis (based off survey data) along with field observations conducted by the author.
The exploration of the propositions reveal a multi-faceted nature of Dharavi that extends beyond the current body of urban theory. Considering the presented propositions and their validation on Dharavi and its links to Mumbai, it becomes possible for us to question and reposition the informal settlement in the current urban theory discourse. ... Read more

This paper discusses the juxtaposition of contemporary urban theory on public space with the emerging forms of public interaction in self-made cities. The public behaviourology of the large self-made settlements is evaluated through the lenses of Euro-American scholars aiming at exploring their political
meaning, social involvement and social entrepreneurialism. The paper tries to understand these phenomena within the specific case of Dharavi, an informal settlement of Mumbai in India.
The research study examines the established urban theories on public space within the cultural contextualism of the self-made city of the Global south. It aims at understanding to what extent the publicness is connected to cultural identity and what kind of new interactive models can be discovered. The investigation is formed as a set of hypotheses seeking a critical perspective
in order to review the validation or disproval of particular urban theories coming from the Euro-American literature. The analysed scholars, which have a genuine interest in publicness of contemporary cities as well as a clear focus on different
social phenomena related to public spaces, includes authors like Lefebvre H., Sennett R., Whyte W., Jacobs J., Gehl J. and Crawford M.
Upon examination of the behavioural patterns, the analysis reveals significant contradictions which highlight the importance of studying the culturalism of cities of the Global south parallel to the established body of Euro-American urban theory. The exposure of the results demonstrates the positive and critical approaches and the possibility of a match or conflict in all attempts. The final phase opens a debate if Euro-American urban theory is on the forefront of understanding the forms of social interactions in public spaces or if the established literature should be upgraded acknowledging the role of the self-made city. ... Read more