In February, the municipality of Zwolle engaged the services of second-year civil engineering students from the University of Twente to work on redevelopment challenges in urban areas. After ten intensive weeks of research, brainstorming, planning and drawing, the students presented their final results in Enschede. The project culminated in a panel discussion in which professionals from the field reflected on the students’ findings and the merits of this challenge-based approach to learning. The afternoon generated valuable insights for everyone concerned.
Transitions in civil engineering
Beau Warbroek, a lecturer on UT’s Bachelor of Civil Engineering programme, fills in the background: "The transitions we face in this field – from climate adaptation and energy transition to circularity and challenges in the housing sector – call for a different way of working and looking at the world. For the past five years, in partnership with the municipality of Zwolle, we have given a group of Bachelor’s students the opportunity to tackle Zwolle's urban development plans while taking full account of the landscape and the city’s location in the IJssel and Vecht delta. A challenging assignment that involves developing future-proof plans for two or three areas each year. We definitely encourage our students to look at the bigger picture and ask how the solutions they design as civil engineers work within a complex mix of stakeholders, legislation, regulations and spatial limitations.”
This year’s Zwolle project kicked off with an excursion to the Spoorzone, Noorderkwartier and Oosterenk, after which the students began working on a plan. Alongside the civil engineering students, fifteen students from the international Master’s programme in Spatial Engineering also took part in the assignment. Warbroek continues, “We rounded off the project with a panel discussion involving participants from the professional field: Witteveen+Bos and Antea Group, Van Wonen, Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, the University of Twente and Zwolle's city architect.”
Challenge-based learning
In addition to focusing on the technical aspects of the students’ work, the panel explored the educational approach that forms the basis for the project. They did so with reference to two central questions: How does challenge-based learning help address the challenges and further the transitions in housing, economics, mobility and climate adaptation? and What skills do engineers need to deal with complex assignments, now and in the future?' Henk Snel, urban planner at the municipality of Zwolle, gives the client’s perspective: “You really notice that students require a different skill set from the ones we were taught twenty years ago. Creativity, flexibility and open-mindedness are just a few examples of skills that have become essential. Transitions don’t present you with a clear-cut path to an end point, so you also need to be able to handle uncertainties effectively. By getting students to take a multidisciplinary approach to Zwolle's ‘wicked problems’, we try to get them to put those skills to use.”
Engineers of the future
The concept of ‘the engineer of the future’ is one that has also been embraced by the municipality of Zwolle. Andreas van Rooijen, Spatial Adaptation Advisor in Zwolle, explains why: “We are used to linear thinking: we draw up an initiation memorandum, get to work and measure the end result on completion. But as this afternoon’s presentation clearly shows, that’s just not how things work anymore. All the challenges we face are interrelated and the world is changing. The old ways of thinking and working are in need of an overhaul and, as a municipality, we are in the middle of that process. We need to stop viewing ambitions and challenges as separate entities; instead we should be bringing them together and working out an integrated approach for dealing with them. That calls for creativity and alternative ways of thinking. The students’ open mindset helps us achieve that goal.”
In short, the client is impressed by what the students came up with. “We challenged the students to break free from the existing context,” Snel reflects. “A number of groups demonstrated a remarkable ability to take a detailed view of the various stakeholders and interests, and who fulfils what role at each stage. They ended up focusing far more intensively on the forces at play than they did on the end solution. That really sparked our interest: they gave us a clearer understanding of the stakeholders than anything we had seen previously. You can see that their thinking draws from a range of disciplines, leading to an integrated approach that operates outside existing frameworks. From our point of view, that’s extremely valuable.”
Rapid development
A week before their presentations, the students attended a lecture on the subject of how to advise a board. It was clear from their presentations that they had taken the tips from the lecture to heart. “It was great to see how the groups of Bachelor’s and Master’s students came together. That really showed how much students progress in just a few years. Young professionals are very quick to develop skills, and that’s exactly the kind of people we need in Zwolle to deal with our urban planning challenges.”
