b'MUDD 25 - Urban Intensity l Urban Design - SydneyReflections on the Interdisciplinary Nature of the ProgramI am taking the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the UNSW Master of Urban Development & Design Program to reflect upon the creative, interdisciplinary controversies that have contributed such distinctive intellectual force to its teaching, research and international profile. My perspective is that of an outsider from Europe, who has also been on the inside of the course for a number of yearsfull-time as acting director in 2012 following my presentation of the Paul Reid Lecture on Learning from Europe? in 2011,1 and later as Visiting Professorial Fellow. Sharing my time between UNSW and the universities in my Professorhome cities of Kassel and Berlin has included initiating and co-convening the Karl Ficher MUDD international studios in Berlin, Hamburg and Lisbon. This is where my personal perspective on the program has been reinforced over almost a decade by the feedback from our European colleagues during the joint workshops that formed the core of the international excursions. Return visits to UNSW provided opportunities for them to look at the finalised studio work in the MUDD exhibitions.2My colleagues were as impressed by the quality and quantity of the student work as the German Consul General in 2013,3 who not an expert in our field, reported enthusiastically on his experience of seeing students hired on the spot by professional offices on the basis of their designs displayed at the exhibition. This not only justified his generous endowment of German beer that helped lubricate the event, his observations on the transition from education to professional practice still reverberate around the Goethe Institute, which had provided financial support for the printing of the MUDD 19 exhibition, a combined display of an exhibition of 1910/2010 city plans conceived at TU Berlin and curated at UNSW, together with the students work on City Visions in Sydney and Canberra.This year, the success of the MUDD Program as a springboard for international careers finds a convincing expression in the presentation of the Reid Lecture by MUDD alumna Zhizhe Yu, who, following her role as a Director at Kohn Pedersen Fox, has been co-founder and Managing Director of AI.SpaceFactory with offices in New York, Shanghai, and Barcelona. Five years ago, in 2016, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the MUDD Program, I looked at explanations for its success. As I wrote in an essay for the MUDD 21 Yearbook,4one answer lay in the structure and method of the 12P1-20200229-FOLIO INTRO.indd 17 2020/3/8 11:19:52'