Urbanity and well-being: co-designing an authentic teaching approach

The project will develop a module on ‘Urbanity and well-being’ for final year undergraduate students at the Universities of Birmingham (Geography, Planning and Environmental Science), Leiden (Urban Studies) and Florence (Architecture and Regional Design).

General Overview

The core principles of the project – codesign, creativity and interdisciplinarity- form its main objectives:

1. To co-design between students, academics and professional services (such as careers network and student project officers) the main themes and assessment methods for a module on Urbanity and Well-being.
2. To have innovative transferable skills built into every stage of the module from the groud up – such as working in cross-Europe interdisciplinary teams and assessment via visual methods.
3. To create a network of research-led academics for exchanging ideas for research informed teaching in areas of geographies of well-being, urban design and planning.
4. Using a blended teaching approach based on the EUniWell values, makeing the module accessible for all consortium partners.

Purpose and Significance

While the concept of well-being is theoretically broad, the module will focus on its social and spatial components. Within the partner network, there is a world-leading research and teaching in Planning, Environmental Health, Geography, Environmental Science, Architecture and Regional Design, which together provides a truly interdisciplinary module. Within these disciplines, there is particular expertise in mental and social well-being, migration, critical perspectives on the psychological and bodily dynamics of situated human behaviour, affective forms of urban governance, urban air pollution and participatory planning.

Implementation Method and Timeline

• The 1st stage, ‘Ideas and inventory’ included focus-groups with students to create a bank of well-being for ideas regarding topics they would like to have included in the module and a survey of alumni to reveal which urban well-being topics they would find helpful in their current employment.
• The 2nd stage, ‘Pitching up’ enabled partners to design the draft structure of the modules and elaborate the three key themes: Geographies of Well-being (University of Birmingham), Urban well-being in Humanities (LeidenUniversity), Urban design, planning and well-being (University of Florence).
• The ‘Let’s go!’ (Poyekhali!), the 3rd stage involves organising workshops in each university with students and stakeholders regarding the urbanity agenda in different cities and skills required to study them. A final workshop on the 21-22 of April 2022 will gather all the partners, students representatives and employers to discuss both traditional and nonrepresentative methodologies of wellbeing research and the module’s design, including authentic assignments and discussions on making the module efficient in terms of career opportunities and transferable skills.

Expected Outcomes

The project will develop a module on ‘Urbanity and well-being’ for final year undergraduate students at the Universities of Birmingham (Geography, Planning and Environmental Science), Leiden (Urban Studies) and Florence (Architecture and Regional Design). It will also provide ideas and resources for teaching-related themes within other modules for undergraduate and postgraduate students.