The role of built environment education programs in environmental education

Abstract

Environmental education and urban environmental education programs seldom link or incorporate natural ecosystems with the built environment in a unified educational approach. The claim developed is that there are a number of design practitioners who have created and implemented practices and programs with a focus on multidisciplinary education in urban planning, urban design and architecture education intended to equip students with the tools and knowledge to affect real change in urban places. As a collective case study, this thesis focuses on the comparative analysis of five programs of built environment education in Canada, USA, Denmark and the Netherlands that utilize urban and rural planning, participatory planning, participatory design, cooperative design (co-design), architecture education, sustainability education, environmental education, and urban environmental education through various methods. The intent of this research is to show how these examples of comprehensive multidisciplinary education techniques incorporate environmental education and urban environmental education with built environment education so that students can better understand how the urban environment operates and how they can affect positive change upon it.