Interdisciplinary Pedagogies for Regional Development Challenges

To address regional development effectively, integrative strategies are needed based on interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary thinking. To prepare professionals for this task it is crucial to look at higher education, in particular regional design education. Three key disciplines which have become separated need to be re-coupled: planning, design, and social sciences. To assess whether regional design education is capable to do so, this chapter first presents a method to make such an assessment possible. This is followed by an application of this method through an analysis of two regional design courses at Master’s level from TU Delft and TU Munich, specifically looking at the underlying pedagogical principles. Two main outcomes of the analysis are: 1) it does not seem to be necessary to have consecutive Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in order to understand and steer regional development; 2) it is necessary to prepare a variety of students from various disciplinary backgrounds for co-creation and cooperation. This leads to a number of follow-up questions, in particular in relation to the admission of students and the assessment of interdisciplinary learning.