Interdisciplinarity in Smart Sustainable City education: exploring educational offerings and competencies worldwide

Abstract

More and more higher education institutions are offering specialized study programs for current and future managers of Smart Sustainable Cities (SSCs). In the process, they try to reconcile the interdisciplinary nature of such studies, covering at least the technical and social aspects of SSC management, with their own traditionally discipline-based organization. However, there is little guidance on how such interdisciplinarity should be introduced. In order to address this gap, this paper identifies 87 SSC-related study programs from around the world and analyzes their disciplinary and interdisciplinary coverage. The analysis classifies programs and competencies, the former using text mining and clustering algorithms, the latter using Bloom’s taxonomy and correlation analysis.