Lectures Design Studios Capstone Projects
Situating Teaching in the Greater Bay Area (GBA), China
Urban design education today is increasingly seen as an interdisciplinary and practice-oriented endeavor, moving beyond conventional discipline-based curriculums. In the context of Pearl River Delta and the Greater Bay Area (GBA), the approach is seeing insights from various disciplines from urban studies, geography, landscape architecture, sociology, and history. The complexity of contemporary urban challenges demands a reconfiguration of educational models, where design becomes a tool not just for creation, but for inquiry and adaptation.
A key feature of this pedagogical shift is the implementation of international collaborative learning (Salama, 2015). Students participate in cross-border design projects that engage with global academic networks and think tanks, allowing them to explore spatial responses to real-world issues facing the GBA. These projects promote a hybrid mode of learning, combining theory with application, where design methodology becomes a core instructional strategy. This model encourages not only innovation in studio practice but also a long-term engagement with critical urban issues.
So far, teaching projects have engaged with a range of themes, including Mapping Megaproject Territories, Port City Territories, Water Heritage, and Delta Urbanism. Water is a key theme that threads across these explorations as both a medium and methodology for understanding urban transformation—linking ecology, infrastructure, and community practices.