Atividades de integração de ferramentas computacionais no ensino de planejamento urbano

Abstract

Urban planning in the 21st century needs to manage spaces built on a network of interlinked and interdependent social, economic, cultural, technological and ecologic complex systems, which depend on scarce and unevenly distributed natural and human resources. Within the contemporary context of technologic change and strengthening global relations, we are challenged by the perception of a rift between the ubiquitous adoption of new technologies in urban planning practices and these technologies’ absence within urban planning education activities. This thesis takes on the process of professional training for urban planning – and specifically, the training of architect-urban planners, as produced by the Brazilian higher education curricula – and its relationship with Information Technology (IT) tools. We sought to understand the mechanisms of advanced computer technology insertion into pedagogical practices in architecture and urban planning, so as to guide the construction of an instructional design instrument, aimed at the integration of technologic, pedagogical and content knowledge in urban planning education activities. This study consists of reflections on the literature regarding higher education pedagogy, especially concerning teaching practices for architecture and urban planning; of a mapping effort directed at advanced computational technologies employed in urban planning practice and research; of the construction of the aforementioned instructional design instrument for the integration of technologic, pedagogical and content knowledge in urban planning; and in the design, implementation and assessment of two technologic integration experiments built on this instructional design instrument. The experiments consisted of the procedural and parametric modeling of an actual urban space, and the urban simulation of land use changes within a hypothetical situation. These models were implemented in the form of transversal interventions within integrated design studios pertaining to the sixth and seventh semesters of the architecture and urban planning program in Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal/Brazil. These were based on situated learning methods as well as elements of experiential learning and construcionism, The activities were assessed through mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, through written queries directed at the experiments’ participants. We observed the viability of working in a higher education context with advanced technological tools that represent innovations in the domain of urban planning, without needing to procure exceptional resources of effect deep changes in the existing curriculum framework. The student’s experimental product and the data collected from queries demonstrate that the IT tools provided good engagement levels among learners, offered production aids in task execution, and through this, brought about the construction of new perspectives and knowledge, and the emergence of new design and planning paradigms. Our applied situated and experiential learning methods achieved greater success as they approached the student’s actual context and their real planning and design targets. We envision the possibility for adoption of these activities into the Architecture and Urbanism teaching practices, for the extension of the experiments into applying other technologies, and for the revision and further development of the instructional design instrument, as well as its publication in the form of an openly accessible online database.