ED-Enabling HEI educators and professionals to advance urban design and planning justice through socio-ecological sustainability

GO2023ITP248A101 01/09/2023 - 31/08/2026 This project will fundamentally empower HEI educators and future urban design and planning professionals to advance and apply more just urban design and planning tools. By mobilising a holistic socio-ecological understanding of sustainability, the intensive training program will equip future urban designers and planners with urgently needed knowledge and skills to steer Ecuador’s rapid urbanisation towards social and ecological justice. Building on the UPS’ extensive emancipatory work with vulnerable groups and governmental and civil society organisations, and radically enriching the institute’s new architecture and urbanism degree, the project explicitly targets the disadvantaged populations most directly affected by the repercussions of global warming and social exclusion. By reshaping how HEI learners, educators and professionals conceptualise and pursue justice-oriented urban design and planning through multi-sector collaboration, and by prioritising marginalised groups’ access to leading-edge education (SDG4), the project will implement a more just urban design and planning praxis poised to challenge and redress social exclusion (SDG10) and foster more sustainable cities and communities (SDG11). Committed to transcend the erroneous nature/culture divide that currently deadlocks innovative territorial development, the project is driven by an incremental and modular strategy, phased in an (1) intensive teaching module in Belgium; an (2) action-learning modules in Ecuador, and a (3) transversal seminar; each of which will be reiterated in line with different UPS branches and strategic sites. An international design studio will furthermore formulate policy recommendations and demonstrate concrete design and planning possibilities. In the long run, this will facilitate a transdisciplinary curricula reform at the UPS, critically enhancing the capacity of future urban design and planning professionals to think and act toward social and ecological justice.