The Development of a Model for Collaborative Learning Between Urban Researchers and Urban Planners

Today, there is a common understanding that universities and the stakeholders in the society need to collaborate in order to handle big societal challenges. Sometimes this is mention as a need of developing mode 2-knowledge. Other times it is describe as a need of developing triple helix processes. A general problem for these kinds of collaborations is different needs of knowledge and different conditions for knowledge production. University knowledge are mainly general and focal, are disseminated mainly through text. Knowledge among stakeholders outside the university, like citizens or professionals, is situated and tacit, and is mainly disseminate through practice.The aim with the paper is two-fold. First, we would like to describe a model for knowledge development between urban researchers and professional public planners. The model was developed by a group of urban planners together with the authors of the paper, who were engaged as on-going evaluators of an urban regeneration project. The aim with the model was to summarize their personal experience of working with collaborative urban planning. The model could therefore be seen as a way for those urban planners to conceptualize their personal experience of an urban developmental project, with the help of urban researchers. During the work with the model, we need to handle the tension between theoretical knowledge versus tacit personal knowledge. How could we as researcher support the transformation of tacit knowledge into a more general model based on focal knowledge?Based on this experience, we take a step back in the second part of the paper, and try to understand the process which leads to the development of the model. Here we will use this process as a way to illustrate what we see as the main challenge in university – society interaction: different needs of knowledge, and different ways to develop knowledge. We will argue that collaboration between university and the society, irrespective of which stakeholders is included in the collaboration, must handle the tensions between different conditions for knowledge production within the academia and outside it. Our way of working is one way to this