Teaching Land Use–Transport Interactions in Italy: Towards an Interdisciplinary Pedagogy?

ABSTRACT

Integrating land use and transport planning is seen as a key approach to pursue more sustainable mobility patterns, but it requires an interdisciplinary pedagogy for those who will be working in these fields: architects, spatial planners and engineers. This paper systematically examines – using syllabi analysis and teacher questionnaires – around 200 academic degree programmes offered by Italian universities, to verify how and to what extent this topic is taught to future professionals. The findings show that the land use–transport issue is still given little consideration in degree programmes, but interesting pedagogical experience based on different course formats can be found.

KEYWORDS:

• Land use and transport integration
• land use planning
• transport planning
• interdisciplinarity
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper, we base the difference between multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary on Davoudi (2010): multi-disciplinary involves a number of disciplines coming together but each working independently and primarily with their own frame of reference and methods, while interdisciplinarity involves occupying the spaces between disciplines to build new knowledge, or a synthesis of knowledge, whereby understandings are modified in the interplay with other perspectives.

2. In Italy, academic disciplines are coded with an unambiguous alphanumeric code. Those dealing with land use planning and design are ICAR/20 – URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING and ICAR/21 – URBAN DESIGN AND LANDSCAPE; those dealing with transport planning and design are ICAR/04 – ROADS, RAILWAYS AND AIRPORTS and ICAR/05 – TRANSPORT. In this article, ICAR/20 and ICAR21 are mentioned as ‘land use planning’ modules, while ICAR/04 and ICAR/05 are mentioned as ‘transport’ modules.

3. The following keywords were used: for transport-related contents in land use planning modules: ‘transport’, ‘accessibility’, ‘mobility’, ‘traffic’, ‘congestion’, ‘infrastructur*’, ‘street’, ‘Transit Oriented Development’; for land use-related contents in transport modules: ‘territor*’, ‘urban’, ‘city’, ‘architect*’, ‘land use’, ‘landscape’, ‘built environment’. Keywords ‘Integrated’ and ‘sustainability’ were used in both the two fields.

4. The checklist included 22 topics, selecting the most recurring topics found through the literature review on LUT interaction in theory, practice and education, and through the analysis of the syllabi. The survey also included a section ‘other’, where teachers were invited to add topics that were not on the list; since only one respondent added a topic, we believe that the set of selected topics was very representative of the LUT interaction issue.