Given the growing relevance of the sustainability agenda to the professions of the built environment, one way to ensure that its mandates are effectively integrated in architecture and urban design is to revisit the role that education, particularly at university level, can play. It is well understood that this requires a significant paradigm shift in the underlying pedagogies involved in educating for sustainability. It could be argued therefore that one of the main challenges is to address the dichotomy between effectively integrating creative expression with rigorous technical exploration, this being a core demand of high‐quality sustainable design. As such, advances in curriculum development must seek to promote this integration more effectively, and, in so doing, facilitate knowledge transfer between both the creative and the scientific disciplines that are core to a sustainable architecture and urban design process. In response, this paper explores the outcomes of a European project, EDUCATE (Environmental Design in University Curricula and Architectural Training in Europe), seeking to look critically at the barriers and opportunities afforded by implementing sustainability in pre‐ and post‐professional education in architecture and urban design, and exploring some of the strategies required to promote such integration. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.