Building Inter-Personal Competence in Architecture and Urban Design Students through Smart Cities at a Higher Education Institution

Daniel S Oh

doi:10.3390/su11247179

Abstract

As the smart city concept and applications continue to evolve, traditional architects and urban designers are facing an increasingly uncertain future. This paper outlines an innovative educational format to bolster and perpetuate the interdisciplinary nature of architects and urban designers that resonates with both sustainable development (SD) and smart cities (SCs). By applying ‘connective knowledge’ to the concept of interdisciplinarity education, a method was established that uses the SC concept to expand upon and create a bridge between distant disciplines in the context of higher education sustainable development (HESD). As a complementary educational pedagogy to the ‘whole institution approach’ to reduce barriers in higher education institutions (HEIs), this paper highlights an opportunity to apply the SC concept as a basis to construct an interdisciplinary design workshop to focus on building inter-personal competence, targeting university-level students majoring in architecture and urban design. The design workshop used microcontrollers and sensors as these are scalable and easily learnt building blocks of the Internet of Things and SCs. The inter-disciplinary workshop ran for 16 weeks with 14 students majoring in architecture and urban design and electrical engineering. Based on interviews and course evaluations, the experiment was vetted using capacities of inter-personal competence in sustainable development. A series of insights and findings from the design workshop indicated positive initial outcomes that were used to form a set of working criteria for the interdisciplinary design workshop. Future work will include structuring empirical data collection and analysis and expanding collaborations with other distant disciplines such as public administration and social innovation, as delineated by the SC concept.

Highlights

Architects and urban designers have been feeling threatened by the rapidly developing concept of smart cities (SCs)
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) magazine featured a special section on smart cities in January 2019 [1], and a speech to the European Commission by Rem Koolhaas, a Pritzker Award laureate, best illustrated how architecture and city-building professions feel about the latest development of smart cities: “I had a sinking feeling as I was listening to the talks by these prominent figures in the field of smart cities because the city used to be the domain of the architect, and frankly, they have made it their domain” [2]
Rather than understanding SCs as a threat to the traditional city-making disciplines, this paper proposes that it can be considered as an opportunity to expand and transcend the current state of sustainable development education for university students majoring in architecture and urban design

Summary

Introduction

Architects and urban designers have been feeling threatened by the rapidly developing concept of smart cities (SCs). The SC is a concept that encompasses all the previous urban ideas including the sustainability and resilience of the urban environment [9,10,11] This ubiquity is manifested in the global proliferation of transnational adaptation of the concept and relevant initiatives [8,9]. The concept of ‘smart sustainable cities’ has emerged as a response to global trends and issues such as sustainability, urbanization, and technological innovation [12,13,14,15] Such a rapid transformation of SC to include environmental sustainability, which was lacking in the widely accepted definition of SCs [16], illustrates the speed and breadth of the SC’s capacity to accommodate and the willingness from other academic as well as professional disciplines to partake in the shaping of the SC concept

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion