Urban design pedagogy, an interdisciplinary approach

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47818/DRArch.2025.v6si189

Keywords:

interdisciplinary collaboration, environmental design research, professional silos

Abstract

Among the many possible solutions to city form, urban designers are expected to create environments with some human purpose of a social, economic, aesthetic and technical merit. Education at a university graduate school should provide the necessary expertise. Questions like who to educate for a career in urban design and for what type of employment addresses the complex relationships designers navigate to build bridges between economic development, environmental quality and socio-political dynamics. Records show that applicants selecting a professional career in urban design are motivated to improve the prevailing physical, social equity and environmental conditions in cities. This article reports on the institutional prerequisites and pedagogy of an interdisciplinary urban design education sponsored jointly by the departments of City and Regional Planning, Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Author Biography

  • Peter C. Bosselmann, University of California, Berkeley

    The author received degrees in architecture and urban design from the Technical University, Karlsruhe in Germany (1972) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1975). He joined the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, where he served as director of the Environmental Simulation Laboratory (IURD) from 1982 to 2017. His professional urban design practice includes work on the downtown plan for the City of San Francisco, the City of Toronto and cities in the Pearl River Delta, Guangdong Province, China. He is a faculty member in the Departments of City and Regional Planning, Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. He served as Chair of Landscape Architecture and Co-Chair of the Master of Urban Design Program. During a sequence of sabbaticals, he was invited as an endowed professor to the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Tokyo University, the Polytechnic University in Milan, the Institute of Technology at Delft, and the South China University of Technology. He is currently a Professor of the Graduate School, UC Berkeley.

References

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Published

2025-12-31

Issue

Vol. 6 No. Special Issue (2025)

Section

Viewpoints

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Copyright (c) 2025 Peter C. Bosselmann

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Bosselmann, P. C. (2025). Urban design pedagogy, an interdisciplinary approach. Journal of Design for Resilience in Architecture and Planning, 6(Special Issue), 01-07. https://doi.org/10.47818/DRArch.2025.v6si189

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