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To understand and deal with real urban development problems, urban planners, designers, and managers need to combine and synthesize a variety of academic and professional knowledge. As our urban challenges grow more complex, learning how to do this effectively becomes ever more important. For educators, this means teaching students how to work in interdisciplinary settings, i.e. how to jointly discover the different disciplinary dimensions of an urban problem, and how to reflectively design courses of action. In this paper, we explore and evaluate the components of such interdisciplinary experiential learning, develop a framework to design and analyse this type of courses, and use it to position and evaluate a specific urban development management course. Results show that, by performing and reflecting upon specific professional roles, the course stimulates students to both integrate different disciplines and reflect on an array of academic and practical insights. Based on our evaluation, we discuss several didactical aspects that may help lecturers to improve their interdisciplinary teaching in urban planning, design, and management courses--particularly when creating learning experiences in an increasingly diverse professional, societal and educational setting.

Value capture (VC) is widely cited as a method for local authorities to provide urban public goods to their cities in the face of fiscal stress. Its application in practice however remains limited. In this article, we aim to explain the implementation process of VC as a strategy to fund public transportation infrastructure through case studies in London, New York, and Copenhagen. Adopting a theory of gradual institutional change, we argue that the implementation of VC depends on the capacity to change distributional institutions that are inherently contested. Particularly relevant is the role of the beneficiary, whose support of VC is necessary but not likely. Our results show that a strategic urban development project can act as a driver to overcome this barrier, but that this driver can, simultaneously, also hinder the institutionalization potential of a VC strategy. We therefore suggest that, for VC strategies to become more commonplace, sharing value uplifts among beneficiaries must become more commonplace too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social sustainability's implementation in urban development is a complex endeavour that demands alternative forms of governance. This article draws on the capabilities approach as an evaluative framework to better understand this implementation process. Through an in-depth case comparison of two Dutch urban development projects, the study analyses how collaborative governance situations (i.e. actors, activities and phases) relate to the expansions of resident capabilities in the urban areas. The findings present three principles for a 'capability-centred governance' of social sustainability in urban development: (1) integrate human logic into urban governance situations (2) balance strong goal commitment with experimentalist approaches and (3) institutionalise social sustainability implementation. The article concludes that social sustainability's implementation requires a conceptualisation in which improvements in people's lives are not seen as the self-evident consequences of a set of place-based policy interventions, but instead as a guiding principle that should continuously be reflected upon and learned from during the different phases of urban development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Europe, very large distribution centres (XXL DCs) are increasingly appearing on planning agendas due to their growing spatial footprint and environmental impacts. Although the emergence of XXL DCs has gained traction in academic research, empirical knowledge about the process that leads to their oft-debated location choice, geometry and landscape integration is still scarce. This paper aims to improve our understanding of this process, analysing the decisions of key stakeholders in the planning-development dialectic behind four exemplary XXL DC transactions, in the Netherlands. Our analyses shed light on the motivations of public and private actors as well as the (lack of) planning rules that shape these transactions. We find that specific incentives in the Dutch decentralized planning and legal-financial system contribute to logistics sprawl. Existing planning instruments that could steer logistics developments, such as environmental and employment quality regulations, are largely left unused. Our study suggests that multilevel planning competencies and international market standards are important variables in explaining XXL DC outcomes. Unlike often assumed in the literature, internationalization has – next to stimulating the growth of XXL DCs – contributed to more sustainable location choices and landscape integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]