Throughout the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 academic years, within the framework of a Project in educational innovation and improvement, (PIME: Proyecto de innovación y mejora educativa), a pilot experience has been carried out in the core Urban Planning courses at the School of Architecture (ETSAV) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). This experience was based on the premise that Urban Planning courses should not be understood as isolated units, but rather as part of a continuous and structured learning process— connected to urban and territorial issues and increasing in complexity, scale and topics addressed. To achieve this, a comprehensive vision of the core structure of Urban Planning was adopted, designing a project-based progression through the courses Urban Planning 1, Urban Planning 2, and Urban Planning 3 in the Degree in Fundamentals of Architecture, in which new learning methodologies and work dynamics have also been introduced through the vertical studio.

With the aim of promoting this integrated and integrative vision of Urban Planning and making students aware and actively involved in it, group project work was conducted during each academic year on real areas within the same municipality and in collaboration with local entities and applying different methodologies such as project-based learning, collaborative learning and service-learning. An innovation incorporated into these course-level methodologies was the vertical studio spanning within all three levels. The main objective was for students to work not only horizontally within each course, but also vertically and in an articulated manner through scheduled joint sessions and a strategic selection of adjacent and overlapping project areas that encouraged interaction among groups. In these sessions, new student teams with students from all three levels shared their analyses and diagnoses of the municipality, both general and specific to each working area, developed common strategies to be included in each level’s projects and proposed a joint outcome by integrating and articulating their three course-level projects.

The article will focus on analyzing the results of the two courses through the surveys carried out on students. This experience has allowed for the development of new relationships between the different courses, effectively enabling cross-curricular collaboration and yielding a number of key conclusions. Most of them derive from the learning process itself, such as increased student motivation and involvement; the improved project outcomes obtaining more integrated and contextually coherent proposals as well as a broader and more holistic understanding of Urban Planning and their own work; the perceptions from both students and teachers, collected from a series of anonymous surveys carried out after each session and at the conclusion of the project. These surveys highlighted the positive assessment of collaborative work and inter-level interaction, the demand for more joint work sessions and widespread recommendations to consolidate and continue with this type of practice.

Keywords: Pedagogical innovation, urban planning, urban design, spatial planning, collaborative learning, vertical studio.