Engineering education vs. environmental planning: A case-study in southern Italy

This paper deals with the environmental awareness in planners’ education, by investigating on the students of Planning, in an Italian school of Building Engineering. The main objective is to evaluate if and how the levels of environmental cognition and sensitivity in students are affected by the knowledge delivered by the course program, depending on the behavioural features of each agent in a traditional technical engineering context. The multiagent, forum-based interaction approach develops as a virtual web forum, supposedly more democratic, reflective and creative than face-to-face interactions. The results provide indications on the impact and the characters of environment-related courses on the environmental knowledge of engineering students, and suggestions to embed sustainability issues in technical curricula in order to reinforce engineers’ background in dealing with environmental complexity.