Bridging the ivory towers

Regeneration & Renewal, 27 October 2006

A trawl through the postgraduate courses available in regeneration reveals an array of options. Sustainable heritage, urban governance for development, community safety, and real estate and regeneration are all possibilities. There are also more traditional-sounding courses - architecture, urban design and urban regeneration are popular choices. This snapshot makes clear how many different disciplines have a role to play in what is collectively known as regeneration. But, as has been much reported, regeneration practitioners are being encouraged to develop a broader knowledge of the industry, rather than concentrating on skills solely applicable to their chosen field.

The latest push towards cross-disciplinary working came in 2004 after Sir John Egan published his report, Skills for Sustainable Communities. Egan argued for a fundamental change in professional practice in the regeneration field, with different professions engaging with and learning about each other's work. He said that it was simply not sufficient for architects to be good at designing buildings and for town planners to be good town planners; all parties need to understand the roles that others in regeneration play and the issues that they face.

Asked whether universities have fully grasped the idea that regeneration is all about professionals working together across specialist boundaries, Dr David Garnett, principal lecturer in the built environment faculty at the University of the West of England (UWE), points out that arguments made in Egan's report were not unprecedented. He says that this debate first began in 1981 with the publication of the Wardale report, which attacked the civil service's over-specialised structure and led to the axing of many senior civil servant posts. There is, he says, an ongoing discussion in regeneration about the idea of creating a new kind of professional, with a range of different skills.

Garnett's view is that, while it is necessary to respond to the Egan agenda, this cannot mean watering down standards of teaching in individual disciplines. "Our philosophy is that we defend expertise and try to create a learning environment where experts can engage with each other," he explains. He says that this idea is gaining popularity among postgraduate departments at other universities running regeneration courses. "Universities have responded to the debate."

Accordingly, UWE has started taking a more cross-disciplinary approach to its regeneration courses, in which students with a wide variety of specialisations work alongside each other. There is one inter-disciplinary module in each year of undergraduate study. In the first year, students on this module break up into groups from different departments, such as architecture and town planning. Each individual then looks at a development project from the perspective of their chosen profession, and then gives a presentation to the rest of the group. "It's very much a know thyself exercise, but they also learn about what other professions do," says Tony Selman, senior lecturer in the built environment faculty.

In the second year, he says that there is a "change of gear". Students are split into cross-disciplinary teams of six and study a real urban renewal site. They are charged with designing a development solution for the site, and present their proposals to a panel comprising UWE staff. "The panel is representative of a client [such as a developer or local authority] and is drawn from all the relevant departments," says Selman.

The third year module gives students the opportunity to present their ideas to an outside audience. UWE hosts a geography conference for sixth formers in the South-West where cross-disciplinary teams have to present a development solution to the conference, which is also judged by a panel of the "great and the good" from the built environment professional institutions. "The students are given the licence to be creative, but they must engage with serious issues," says Selman. "So, the format is up to them. We've done the conference in the styles of Newsnight and the Jerry Springer Show." The idea is to test the students' skills, but also to educate sixth formers about the breadth and complexity of regeneration projects, he says.

UWE has also launched a doctorate programme this academic year. To gain their professional doctorate in the built environment, practitioners come together in workshops to look at complex regeneration projects. The idea is to assemble a group of six students who are, for example, working on different aspects of a particular problem in a particular place. "This is aimed at people in mid-career who may have a great deal of knowledge in their own discipline, but are coming across complex problems [that require broader knowledge]," says Garnett. An optional module allows students to pick any new area of learning offered by the faculty. "Someone might think that they need to learn more about how to run a social business or carry a project through planning procedures,"he says. The programme will be formally assessed and students will have to be able to demonstrate their new-found, multi-disciplinary knowledge by producing a 50,000-word thesis.

At Birmingham University's Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (CURS), a similar philosophy is in place. "We're sensitive to the fact that we need to improve the notion of group working and not deliver a traditional [teaching] approach," says lecturer Alex Burfitt. All taught postgraduate students are required to take modules that give them a broader understanding of current issues than would be offered by a course in a single professional discipline. The masters programmes allow students to specialise, but they must learn about the work of other professions. "As a masters student you cannot come here and stay in your own little world," says Burfitt. The approach is similar for research students, who are required to attend joint events and workshops at which they share their research and learn from their peers' work in other fields.

Multi-disciplinary working is also taking shape at the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. This academic year, it offers a masters programme in real estate, planning and regeneration. Students on the programme can choose to take one of five MScs, including one in city planning and real estate development and one in real estate and regeneration. The five degrees share a common structure, so that students can switch course at any time prior to starting the second part of the programme.

Meanwhile, regeneration skills body the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) is working to develop links with universities to help push its agenda of sustainable communities. It says it is aware of the need for a more cross-disciplinary approach, and has set up a working group to create a common core curriculum for everyone studying regeneration-related subjects. The group consists of representatives of universities, colleges, professional bodies such as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), and the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), voluntary organisations and local and national government representatives. Peter Roberts, chair of the ASC, says that the group started work over the summer and that initial guidelines are expected in the spring.

The ASC has also launched the first of what Roberts calls "cross-professional educational commitments". This sees the academy working directly with the Chartered Institute of Housing to provide inter-disciplinary training and development to housing professionals involved in delivering sustainable communities. The partnership is the first of several that the academy is proposing with professional bodies, including RICS, the RTPI and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In an interview with Regeneration & Renewal earlier this year, ASC chief executive Gill Taylor revealed that she believes that the ASC will have secured agreements with all ten of the main professional institutions by this Christmas, and that she hopes to start piloting educational materials in 2007.

Jess Steele, deputy chief executive of the British Urban Regeneration Association, welcomes the move towards cross-disciplinary learning. "The key skills for successful regeneration are about seeing the big picture, understanding complex interactions and learning from experience," she says. However, she does strike a note of caution: although the theory and practice of regeneration can be studied at university, she adds that it can be "more useful" to learn from experience. "Academic courses can get students thinking about relevant issues, but it's not until they are interacting with real places and schemes that they will become regenerators," she says.

It seems that there is definite movement towards addressing Egan's concerns about a lack of cross-disciplinary knowledge in regeneration. Whether training is developed and delivered through universities or the ASC and the professional institutions, there is some evidence that the paradigm shift that Egan so desired is starting to take place.