*Celebrating Spatial Planning at TU Delft: 2008-2019. Edited by Stead, Bracken, Rooij & Rocco

Urbanism . TU Delft 79
AMS MADE
Metropolitan Innovators
ROBERTO ROCCO
The Metropolitan Analysis,
Design & Engineering (MADE)
Master track at AMS Amsterdam
Metropolitan Solutions Institute
is a course developed by TU
Delft and Wageningen University,
in which SPS has a decisive presence.
Contemporary metropolitan
regions face a variety of complex
challenges that concern large
numbers of stakeholders with,
often competing, claims originating
from different world views. One
of the major challenges faced by
advanced metropolitan regions like
the AMA (Amsterdam Metropolitan
Area) is how to manage transitions
towards sustainability. This transition
is characterised by a systems
change, which means that whole
chains of production, consumption,
and behaviour must change over a
long period of time, thus involving a
large number of stakeholders with
multiple worldviews and competing
claims over those systems.
This course enables Metropolitan
Innovators to identify and evaluate
these claims from three main
perspectives: socio-technical,
ecosystems, and spatial justice. This
course complements and supports
the Metropolitan Challenges Course,
which is given in the first quarter
of the programme, and provides
a solid ground for the Metropolitan
Solutions Course given later. It
introduces and discusses tools and
theoretical frameworks for unravelling
complex metropolitan challenges
and presents approaches from
different areas of knowledge dealing
with metropolitan innovation challenges.
The management of systems’ transition
to sustainability have several
dimensions: cultural, political,
technical, and aesthetic, to cite but
a few. This is because, according to
Henning Larsen, we assume sustainability
can only happen when
its three crucial dimensions (social,
economic, and environmental)
happen simultaneously. Hence, this
transition cannot be addressed by
planners, engineers, and designers
alone, as they require engagement
with a multiplicity of actors holding
the different perspectives necessary
to understand and tackle all
the dimensions involved.
The various disciplines that contribute
to AMS bring particular
approaches to innovations towards
sustainability: from engineering
to entrepreneurship, from urban
design to human geography, from
environmental sciences to sociology
of innovation. Combining these into
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary
ways of working is required
if we are to be able to deal with
urban development and innovation.
For any actor who wishes to contribute
to advanced metropolitan
solutions working towards sustainability,
it becomes crucial to be able
to translate metropolitan challenges
into researchable questions, and
to be able to understand, communicate,
and to cooperate with other
actors in order to integrate their
knowledge about issues at hand,
and to understand different (and
often conflicting) objectives.
Awareness of the socio-economic
context, as well as the implicit and
explicit values and cultural norms
operating in a specific place, are essential
to achieve suitable solutions.
This course enables students to
use, contrast, discuss, and integrate
those various approaches so that
they can engage with metropolitan
innovations and potential solutions
in a meaningful way, and they do
this by using three main perspectives:
socio-technical, ecosystems,
and spatial justice.
Fig. 45: Students of the MADE course Metropolitan Innovators explore the Bijlmer, Amsterdam. Photo by R. Rocco.