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Urban design is inherently interdisciplinary and the ability to collaborate across disciplines is sought after in the professional realm as it’s vital to delivering resilient and sustainable approaches to address contemporary urban issues. But, interdisciplinary urban design courses are often offered within related disciplines, such as landscape architecture, or architecture at the graduate level, and less so in collaboration with engineering disciplines such as civil engineering at the undergraduate level. We designed a capstone course specifically for interdisciplinary collaboration among urban design and civil engineering disciplines and collected quantitative and qualitative data via surveys and reflective journals to understand the benefits and challenges as perceived by students and the teaching faculty. Findings show that initial vague estimates of benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration were—over time—substantiated and animated with reports of specific and nuanced examples of new perspectives, interdisciplinary transfer of technical skills, and convergences among disciplinary knowledge bases. To illustrate the impact of interdisciplinary collaboration on urban design outputs, we show evidence of increased technical sophistication in comparison with a prior, mono-disciplinary urban design capstone. To streamline interdisciplinary collaboration among urban design and civil engineering design courses, we present lessons for upgrading university physical and soft infrastructure, program level changes for each discipline, and offer ideas for faculty development opportunities.

Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez

ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4