The ‘Grand Challenges’ of our times, like climate change, resource depletion, global inequity, and the destruction of wildlife and biodiversity can only be addressed by innovating cities. Despite the options of tele-working, tele-trading and tele-amusing, that allow people to participate in ever more activities, wherever they are, people are resettling in cities at an unprecedented speed. The forecasted ‘rurification’ of society did not occur. Technological development has drained rural society from its main source of income, agriculture, as only a marginal fraction of the labour force is employed in agriculture in the rich parts of the world. Moreover, technological innovation created new jobs in the IT and service sectors in cities. Cities are potentially far more resource efficient than rural areas. In a city transport distances are shorter, infrastructures can be applied to provide for essential services in a more efficient way and symbiosis might be developed between various infrastructures. However, in practice, urban infrastructures are not more efficient than rural infrastructures. This paper explores the reasons why. It digs into the reasons why the symbiotic options that are available in cities are not (sufficiently) utilised. The main reason for this is not of an economic nature: Infrastructure organisations are run by experts who are part of a strong paradigmatic community. Dependence on other organisations is regarded as limiting the infrastructure organisation’s freedom of action to achieve its own goals. Expert cultures are transferred in education, professional associations, and institutional arrangements. By 3 concrete examples of urban systems, the paper will analyse how various paradigms of experts co-evolved with evolving systems. The paper reflects on recent studies that identified professional education as the initiation into such expert paradigms. It will thereby relate lack of urban innovation to the monodisciplinary education of experts and the strong institutionalised character of expertise. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63007-6_43 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karelmulder/
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From the article The paradigm shift towards competency-based education in the Netherlands has a logical counterpart: the need for more flexibility in the curricula. After all, in competency-based education it is recognized that learning not only takes place in designated places (school, university), but may happen every time when the learner is confronted with a challenge. This observation leads to the necessity to incorporate the learning outcomes of formal and informal education in one curriculum. As a result, the educational process becomes more complex and must be better structured to control the individual learning outcomes. In this paper we discuss this paradox: how more flexibility in the program creates the need for more control in the process. We also discuss what kind of IT-tools are helpful in controlling flexibility in curricula for higher professional education.
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