The City as a Laboratory: Concepts, Designs, and Experiments in Higher Education

Introduction

The European Project Semester (EPS) at Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) provides a set of Authentic Learning opportunities. Very often, one of the options includes the use of the city as a lab because cities are an accessible and inexhaustible resource. For this purpose, professors from different UPV departments collaborate to define, supervise, and evaluate the projects based on their complementary expertise. These projects also allow learning from stakeholders like neighborhood associations, technical staff, and private and public institutions managers.

The main goal of this chapter is to explain why a city could be a fantastic learning and experimental object. Obviously, students have a background on the subject, and it is easy to find the appropriate level of complexity for creating exciting scenarios and tasks.

To achieve this goal, the authors explain the rationale and describe methods and results from three examples:

• 1.

  An EPS project called Cities, also for kids. It was a learning experiment on the inclusive city carried out during the academic year 2018/19 (Steerman et al., 2019).

• 2.

  A workshop about the key aspects of critical complex city installations, with special emphasis on a bus station. The activity is based on Kolb’s reflexive learning theory, understanding learning as the creation of knowledge through experience, but which needs reflection to be produced. Thus, learning is a conversation between thinking and doing, and it involves blending theory and practice.

• 3.

  The redesign of the Valencia bus station as an EPS challenge proposed for the 2020/21 academic year (Berger et al., 2020).

Thus, the chapter is structured in the three parts mentioned above, each one detailed from the contextualisation to its own conclusions or, in the case of the workshop, from the ideation and objectives to the contents to be worked on, which are complemented by a general introduction and final conclusions.

Background

To consider any activity connected with a city is a constant challenge involving all the subjects. It also means entering the dynamic, ever-changing space in which we live, work, and relate to others, especially where everybody has his own experiences and perceptions of the existing collective image. This is a constant challenge and responsibility that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways.

Therefore, as a learning experience, it identifies, includes, and involves emotions and gives rise to curiosity and debate. As it is carried out within the EPS framework, it provides enriched feedback from the visions and contributions of other cultures and ways of city living, besides being an added value to the interchange experience. Working on an aspect of the city in the creative EPS framework with teams of different nationalities, using the heterogeneity of the diverse backgrounds, is a fantastic opportunity to learn not only through mutual enrichment but also by meeting the actual environment and its dynamics, experiencing the object of the analysis in person. This sensorial enrichment is a motivating contribution to the final result, as it considers the proposed objective as approachable and relevant, and this is a guarantee of motivation and success. Teamwork, leadership, practical thinking, innovation, and effective communication are some of the transversal competences that reinforce the students during the course of this activity.

Carrying out a specific activity in the city also means both practical and economic or normative problems besides considering diversity, one of its intrinsic components: functional, gender, and social diversity, as well as considering the different collectives. Greater sensitivity, empathy, respect and humanity are other values that indirectly enrich the activity.

In fact, actions related to activating the city for normally under-considered population segments, such as children, are becoming more and more frequent in town planning. For example, the creation of pedestrian zones and 15-minute cities are cutting-edge subjects currently being considered by the European Union (EU) authorities in relation to children’s welfare. The results are inclusive and accessible spaces that favor equality and communal life. Trying to show the relevance of the context of the case under study, in this occasion the city, its collectives and problems and the possibility of acquiring “soft skills” or indirect values through it is one of the considered premises.