Engineering Education versus Environmental Planning: A Case Study in Southern Italy

Abstract This paper deals with the environmental awareness in planners' education. It investigates the awareness of students 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 programme, depending on the behavioural features of each agent in a traditional technical engineering context. The multi-agent, forum-based interaction approach develops as a virtual web forum, and may be more democratic, reflective and creative than face-to-face interactions. The results provide indications of the impact of the characteristics of environment-related courses on the environmental knowledge of engineering students, and makes recommendations to embed sustainability issues in technical curricula in order to reinforce engineers' knowledge in dealing with environmental complexity.

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