Understanding urban sustainability from Mode 2 Science and transdisciplinary education: how Master Thesis Ateliers of the Ghent Stadsacademie tackle wicked issues

The wicked sustainability problems that we are increasingly facing not only require new ways of knowledge production, but also challenge our traditional educational system. More and more importance is attached to educational practices and experiments focusing on transdisciplinary problem framing, a pluralistic search for solutions and active collaboration with various stakeholders throughout society. The aim of this article is to investigate how an inter- and transdisciplinary setting in which students develop master theses can contribute to learning about a specific urban problem and what challenges this transdisciplinary education entails. Starting from relevant theoretical and analytical frameworks, such as Mode 2 Science (Nowotny et al. 2005) and the three-phase model of Lang et al. (2012), we first outline the philosophy and approach of the general setting: the Stadsacademie, a collective learning platform or ‘collaboratory’ to explore and investigate wicked problems perceived in the city of Ghent (Belgium). To provide more in-depth and refined insights, we focus on an exemplary activity of the Stadsacademie: the Master Thesis Ateliers ‘Diversity in Social Housing’. A Master Thesis Atelier (MTA) is a collaborative trajectory of one academic year in which 4 to 8 master students and their supervisors from different disciplinary backgrounds concentrate on one specific urban problem and collaborate with non-academic actors aiming to explore and to impact upon that issue. We conclude this article with overall reflections and suggestions for transdisciplinary approaches within educational practices to tackle wicked sustainability issues.