Building the City Now! Towards a Pedagogy for Transdisciplinary Urban Design

This paper presents and discusses the unique experience of a training program in urban design, directed by the authors, which facilitated an exchange, integration and new advancement of the pedagogy and knowledge of diverse fields concerned with the city: Building The City Now! A joint effort between Catalan architects and Russian academia and businesses with support from European experts, BCNow!’s first edition became a training ground for fifteen Russian professionals and activists from diverse backgrounds in Saint Petersburg in 2014-2015 seeking to explore an alternative understanding of the city and its production in their practices. Based on the idea of transdisciplinarity, the program was developed with a hands-on approach. This paper reflects on the experience and lessons from BCNow! contextualizing it in the existing traditions of urban thinking, discusses the idea of transdisciplinarity by relating it to comparable experiences, and zooms onto the specifics of the curriculum providing concrete illustrations of the training and its outcomes.