Abstract

In the beginning, the notion of habitat had been conceived in the fields of life sciences and ecology studies. Subsequently, it began to be extrapolated by housing researchers as a useful term applicable in urban–rural studies. As shown, the habitat itself is an interdisciplinary concept that crosses and bridges several fields of knowledge, such as natural sciences, like biology, and human sciences, like architecture. This article continues Part I, published in the 2022 special issue. The study aims to show that the human habitat conception of dwelling is a better approach for teaching built environment design, understood as a problem in which the disciplines of design, STEM, and natural and even human sciences, converge. This is achieved by validating a multidimensional model that implemented this notion with an interdisciplinary group of students from eight different bachelor programs related to construction, architecture, civil and environmental engineering, and even other engineering and human sciences fields; this group of thirty-six students arranged six study cases in Colombia. Additionally, this is shown through the articulation of the integrated sustainability dimensions with categories that are brought forward from the ecology, converging in a transdisciplinary pedagogical model integrated into the intervention design process (IDP). Ultimately, the implementation of this development entails a transition of the notion of dwelling toward a notion of human habitat, which in turn also implies several changes in the teaching paradigms for designing not only human-oriented spaces but also nature-oriented ones. We conclude that this transition fosters a more complex insight into the human intervention in nature and the built environment that overcomes the simplistic insight of traditional housing and construction projects.