Vision and strategy making: Teaching spatial planning in design education on a situated learning environment

This chapter introduces the pedagogical approach of guiding vision and strategy making in university design studios. This is a unique way of teaching spatial planning in design education, bridging research, planning, and design. It will use one of the master’s courses at the Urbanism Department of TU Delft as an example: the regional design studio ‘Spatial Strategies for the Global Metropolis’. This approach is based on the tradition of planning schools with design education – using the design studio as a key method for teaching. This tradition has made spatial planning in design education different from other planning schools that focus on policies or social/environmental sciences. The approach being introduced is not only evidence-based/scientific but also explorative at the same time, prone to search for the more plausible and desirable future scenarios. It is in line with the role of regional design in practice, in the context of collaborative planning. To teach such practice-related skills, an authentic assignment from and the interaction with the ‘real world’ are needed, namely a situated learning environment, which mimics the actual situation and collaborative efforts of spatial planning. Spatial vision and development strategy are both tools of spatial planning in practice, meant to frame and steer the development towards a more sustainable future, with the involvement of stakeholders. In design education, they are also seen as design products students could and should work on to understand the roles of these tools in spatial planning and how to use them to develop regional design proposals.