Teaching for Urbanism: a didactical experience in a newly academicized area

This paper describes a didactical experience in the Masters course of the Department of Urbanism of the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and issues related to the academicization of its curriculum. Although urbanism is a firmly established discipline in many curricula, in The Netherlands it has entered higher education as a practical and vocational discipline from the engineering tradition. The experience of the implementation of a stronger academic approach in such an environment reveals differences in worldviews among practitioners and academics, which result in frictions about the role and the form of academic research in Masters’ education. This is becoming more evident as urbanism is confronted with the need to situate research actions and outcomes in relation to other more established disciplines, for example through research assessments. We have found problems related to a dysfunctional relationship between research claims and research actions, problems with assessment, trans-disciplinary dialogue and other issues common to areas of knowledge and practice recently entering academia. Here we discuss how new courses and requirements were introduced, that aimed to encourage an academic attitude and improve outputs in relation to academic standards, and how this was done by seeking a dialogue between research and design practice. The experience is examined both from the point of view of staff’s expectations and students’ reception.