An Action Research Inquiry into Professional Training and Development for Addressing Complex Urban Problems

The world is becoming increasingly urbanized. Municipal, metropolitan, regional and national governments, companies, international organizations, financiers, technology developers and civil society across the globe are faced with increasingly complex problems to transform the potential challenge of rapid urbanization into an opportunity to foster development and prosperity in societies. Cities are under immense pressure to address environmental sustainability issues. In addition, utilizing the potential of technologies and innovations, often under the label of Smart City initiatives, to enhance the performance in terms of efficiency, resilience and sustainability has become an important priority on many cities'€™ agendas. In this complex urban context, infrastructures, which are best conceptualized as complex socio-technical systems, play a crucial role in attaining the desired performance for cities. Governance of urban infrastructures plays a pivotal role in enabling cities to deliver quality services to citizens. Addressing complex problems associated with governance of large urban infrastructures calls for a genuine holistic-multidisciplinary approach. However, literature shows that urban practitioners (both in the public and private sector) seldom approach complex urban problems from such a holistic and multidisciplinary perspective, and technical and discipline-specific approaches continue to prevail. The current literature also highlights the important role that professional training can play in helping urban practitioners to adopt such a perspective. Yet, only a limited number of studies have attempted to shed light on the challenges associated with training urban practitioners to adopt a holistic perspective; even fewer studies go on to propose effective strategies for dealing with those challenges in practice. This thesis precisely sheds light on this understudied domain of research. Action Research is used as the research methodology in this thesis. A full-scale Executive Master program on innovative governance of large urban systems (IGLUS) was developed and served as the empirical context of the research. The thesis reports the processes undertaken for the design, implementation, and continuous evaluation of the IGLUS Executive Master. Building upon this solid empirical basis, it also provides a systematic and structured illustration of some of the most important challenges associated with training urban practitioners to adopt a more holistic-multidisciplinary perspective to address complex urban problems. Strategies for effectively dealing with these challenges, and ultimately delivering a transformative learning experience, are also proposed. The key findings of this thesis are that critical reflection is instrumental to developing meaningful learning experiences for adult learners. Developing and using conceptual frameworks can serve as an invaluable pedagogical exercise; supporting the meaning-making processes for both the educators and learners. Helping adults to effectively engage in critical reflection in and on their actions is absolutely essential, but is an inherently complex and delicate task. Thus, delivering a learning experience on the basis of promoting critical reflection requires a genuinely innovative, reflective and comprehensive approach towards the design and delivery of the training programs; in these settings knowledgeable, dedicated and creative program managers and educators play a pivotal role.