Learning by design
in an international Urban planning
and Policy design Master Program

The paper illustrates an experience in the teaching of urban design and planning carried out at the Politecnico of Milano where the School of Architecture offers a two-year Master of Science program in Urban Planning and Policy Design open to international students. The master, organized by semesters, offers both introductory courses and topics of advanced research activities.

In the first workshop, Urban Design and Planning Studio, the students are encouraged to challenge with experimental themes and innovative forms of urban design. In coherence with the recent experience developed at the Politecnico of Milano (Bologna and Milan, sharing the keyword “città di città”), the urban planning and design require a range of activities that generates knowledge, a survey conducted through design and imagination, through the ability to orient the information, systematise the data collected. This way of looking at the project activities means that the correlation between survey, urban analysis and project will not be linear and consequential.

Open publication

Therefore the teaching approach of the Design Studio simulate a highly complex professional design work and research situation, guided by a sequence of concrete, hands-on experiences: the objective is to introduce the student to a critical reading of the context, the identification of intervention priorities, the production of strategies and guidelines and territorial re-composition schemes.
The contribution is organised in three parts: an initial part deals with the School’s specific approach to the teaching of urban planning and design (§ 2) and how this correlates with the recent internationalisation of the School (§ 1). The second part describes the didactic principles and practices underlying the activities of the Design Studio, a hands-on experience that brings together project and research (§§ 3 and 4). The third part is about the results of Design Studio activities, which are analysed from a critical perspective (§§ 5 and 6).

Antonio Longo and Marco Mareggi
DiAP Department of Architecture and Planning,
Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
E-mail: antonio.longo@polimi.it
E-mail: marco.mareggi@polimi.it