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Abstract
This paper deals with the environmental awareness in planners' education. It investigates the awareness of students in an Italian school of building engineering. The main objective is to evaluate if and how the levels of environmental cognition and sensitivity in students are affected by the knowledge delivered by the course programme, depending on the behavioural features of each agent in a traditional technical engineering context. The multi-agent, forum-based interaction approach develops as a virtual web forum, and may be more democratic, reflective and creative than face-to-face interactions. The results provide indications of the impact of the characteristics of environment-related courses on the environmental knowledge of engineering students, and makes recommendations to embed sustainability issues in technical curricula in order to reinforce engineers' knowledge in dealing with environmental complexity.
Notes
1. This paper is the result of a work carried out jointly by the whole group of authors. Nonetheless, the sections ‘Introduction’, ‘Some Impacts at the Collective Level’, ‘Synthetic Results and the Role of Environmental Sensitivity’ and ‘Conclusions and Perspectives’ have been written by D. Camarda, ‘Environmental Knowledge for professionals: Potentials and Dilemmas’ by F. Selicato, and ‘Some Impacts at the Individual Level’ by M.Cera.
2. The topics were named as: Punta Perotti, Derelict coastal lands, Urban periphery, Urban coastal area, Rural hinterland, External areas.
3. Agent 531099 has read about a project to protect Italian costs, on the Internet, whereas agent 530727 says that environment should not be damaged and is afraid that the cited development may increase pollution—but in the end he agrees with the proposal.