Using boundary objects to make students brokers across disciplines

Abstract

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.

Planning for nodes, places and people in Flanders and Brussels: Developing an empirical railway station assessment model for strategic decision-making

“…After all, several studies dealing with interdisciplinary communication processes facilitated by PSS (see Geertman & Stillwell, 2009;Papa, Coppola, Angiello, & Carpentieri, 2017) stress the importance of spatial visualizations and of transparency in data and methods to render results more easily understandable and relevant for the end users of the tool. In these earlier studies, the added value of node-place analyses as perceived by their intended end users is nonetheless rarely evaluated; to the best of our knowledge, there are no such studies with the exception of Gilliard et al (2018), that critically validated a node-place model application in a design studio setting with urban design students. This observation has a broader significance, as few planning support instruments commonly discussed in the literature are explicitly validated by their intended users (te Brömmelstroet, 2010;Straatemeier, Bertolini, te Broömmelstroet, & Hoetjes, 2010;Pelzer, Geertman, vander Heijden, & Rouwette, 2014; see also Bertolini, 2017).…”

Regional Urbanisation through Accessibility?—The “Zweite Stammstrecke” Express Rail Project in Munich

“…It allows visually to identify "unsustained nodes" and "unsustained places" (stations with an accessibility surplus over the local density of functions and vice versa), as well as "dependent" and "stressed" stations, that are balanced but in danger of inefficiency or overcrowding. The model has been operationalised and tested in various settings (e.g., [82,83]), and several additions have been proposed to derive more detailed station typologies (e.g., [84]). For this paper, we assumed the accessibility values from the second step as node values and the combined functional data (population size, firms and facilities) as place values.…”