The competencies required for steering urban development sustainably are scattered amongst various disciplines. This is particularly relevant for planners working at the interface of different sub-disciplines, such as transport and land-use planning, exemplified by transit-oriented development (TOD). In this paper, we use Bertolini's node-place model (NPM) example for TOD to test whether it enables interdisciplinary work to be undertaken in planning education. We tested our hypothesis in two design studios by challenging urban design students to develop their own design brief based on an NPM. The paper is of a dialogic, discursive nature. Students discuss whether or not the NPM enables them to better understand the relationship between transit and urban development and to develop spatial strategies based upon an integrative approach. Our discussion reveals that the NPM cannot necessarily bridge disciplinary boundaries successfully. However, both lecturers and students see value in the model as a didactic instrument.

Between 10 and 13 April 2017, the 11th AESOP Young Academics Conference took place at the Technical University of Munich on the theme of “Planning and Entrepreneurship – Planning and Public Policy at the Intersection of Top-down and Bottom-up Action”. The conference’s aim was to seek to understand (i) how planners can shape conditions so that young enterprises and innovative local activism can thrive and (ii) how planners themselves can benefit by integrating entrepreneurial thinking into their routines. The bandwidth of papers resembled the breadth of planning as a discipline gathered under the AESOP umbrella. Several bridges connecting planning and entrepreneurship became apparent, among them that (i) planning can provide an ecosystem for entrepreneurial activities that support local economies, providing a liveable environment for communities, (ii) planning approaches should succeed in incorporating the demands from market-based entrepreneurialism while creating a different and inclusive form of planning, and (iii) planners should support, and become, “hackers” and social entrepreneurs

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