Interdisciplinary design education in the field of urban infrastructure

Abstract

Building resilient urban infrastructure that can anticipate the challenges that come with climate change needs an interdisciplinary approach. Deviating from the paradigm of engineering protection can only be done when the spatial context is integrated. Yet, interdisciplinary cooperation between civil engineering and spatial design, fields with very different cultures and languages, has been protocolized to a multidisciplinary collaboration over time. In order to change this Delft University of Technology incorporated interdisciplinary design into its MSc-level education of civil engineers and spatial designers. Taking challenges in Japan, which have been subject to storm surge and tsunami hazards, Albania, the United States, and Ghana, all of which suffer from pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding proved solid learning grounds. The interdisciplinary design projects, organised for students from various disciplines, were set up to learn from and perform the hypothetical redesign and reconstruction of areas in flood plains, aiming to increase disaster resilience and liveability.

The participating students were asked to evaluate their projects to be able to assess the effectiveness of the Tohoku interdisciplinary design method and discuss lessons learned for interdisciplinary projects with engineering and design students. The results show that the interdisciplinary project provides engineering students with more broad and practical experience of the sort that has been lacking in the decades since engineering education came to be dominated by academic researchers rather than practitioners. On the other hand, students in architecture and urbanism viewed this opportunity as a chance to apply their already acquired integrative skills in an interdisciplinary setting.