Great Reset - Innovations in Urban Planning, Crisis as Catalyst?

Elena Schirnding de Almeida, since 2020

Ongoing climate change and rapid urbanization worldwide have shifted the question about urban change processes to the center of political attention.  The adoption of the 2030 Agenda by the United Nations means that cities all over the world have committed themselves to the paradigm of Sustainable Development. Taking for granted this unifying principle, the research project asks the questions: How can cities get the job done on a local level? How do local, historic, political, and administrative circumstances determine the urgently needed urban change processes? How does innovation intersect with urban design practices? In 2020 one could observe rapid and unexpected changes in urban spaces, such as “Pop-Up Bike Lanes” and “Shani gardens” (sidewalk seating for restaurants) - projects that were discussed for years, but never realized. This is followed by the question of whether we can learn something from the current Covid-19 crisis that could serve as a profound strategy to design cities in the 21^st century.

Elena Schirnding de Almeida is an Architect and Urban Planner, currently leading the Public Planning Lab at the Professorship of Urban Design at TUM. She started her research project in 2020 under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Benedikt Boucsein.

Reframing Mobility – Transition Design for the new everyday

Marco Kellhammer, since 2020

The transition to sustainable mobility is necessary and already underway. Thanks to digital services, diverse mobility options are accessible, and accessibility in urban neighborhoods of the industrialized world is better than ever. However, to date, technologically driven innovations have not led to the required reduction in resource use and emissions associated with mobility. What new mobility and lifestyles are desirable and contribute to a livable city for everyone? Marco explores in his dissertation using the Transition Design approach (Irwin 2015) how systemic change at the neighborhood level can be successful. What relationships and interactions exist in the neighborhood, and how do they shape the way we think about mobility? What new design strategies support us in imagining and negotiating diverse futures to develop ecologically and socially sustainable mobility infrastructures that everyone can participate in? His goal is to generate system and process knowledge and elaborate on the role of design in the context of transformations. The BMBF research project MCube aqt serves as the case study and foundation for this doctoral project. Research with living labs is complemented by the collaborative development of futures. Science, administration, business, and civil society work together and influence the current framing of what is and what could be.

Marco studied Industrial Design at the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück and spent one term abroad at the PUC Rio de Janeiro. After his Bachelor in 2012 he was working at the Institute of Design Research Vienna for more than three years focussing on research and design for socially and ecologically sustainable futures. Marco completed his M.Sc. in Industrial Design at TUM in 2018. He was a working student at Hans Sauer Stiftung and is co-founder of the social enterprise überkochen e.V. In 2019 he returned to TUM as a research and teaching associate at the Chair of Industrial Design and joined the team at the Professorship of Urban Design in 2020.

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Benedikt Boucsein (TUM) and Prof. Dr. Eileen Mandir (Munich University of Applied Sciences)
Mentor: Dr.-Ing. Sandra Hirsch

“IN BETWEEN. Exploring hybrid planning for redeveloping informal settlements in the mumbai metropolis.”

Ayesha Müller-Wolfertshofer, since 2020

Informal settlements, slums, favelas, gecekondus, barrios or townships, part of cities across the globe, are an immediate response to the lack of affordable housing in them. Urbanization in the search for economic, social or political improvement has led to a densely populated urban fabric where the common man struggles to find a home in real-estate markets driven by neo-liberal policies. Citizens are forced to build tenements on vacant plots of land without authorisation, often lacking electricity and basic sanitation. These settlements become a base for the underprivileged and alienated, sheltering people In-Between regulations, jobs and housing, as they attempt to improve their status.

Mumbai is presented as a case study for understanding the context of informal settlements, where participatory planning methods will be studied to integrate top-down and bottom-up initiatives into the redevelopment process. Current ‘slum-redevelopment’ projects primarily take into consideration residential requirements of informal communities, without providing adequate spaces for economic or public services. This dissertation project explores mixed-use hybrid buildings as a means of combining Mumbai’s housing needs with the individual and community requirements of inhabitants.

Ayesha Müller-Wolfertshofer completed her Bachelor in Architecture at Vidyavardhan’s IDEA, Institute of Design Environment and Architecture, in India between 2010 and 2015. At the Munich University of Applied Sciences she completed her M.A. in Architecture with a specialization in Urban Planning from 2015 to 2017. Ayesha has worked in various architectural and urban planning firms since she began her studies and is an architect under the Bayerische Architektenkammer since June 2020. In July 2020 she officially began her thesis at the Technical University Munich under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Benedikt Boucsein and in collaboration with her Mentor, Hussain Indorewala, from the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies in Mumbai.

New Pathways: A Study of European Railway Stations from the Perspective of Sustainable Development.

Alice Lunardon, since 2020.

Alice Lunardon’s dissertation project "New Pathways: A Study of European Railway Stations from the Perspective of Sustainable Development" investigates causes and effects of the current development of stations and their relationship with cities’ sustainable development. The connection between the railway and the city is the railway station. In this key position, the station has two roles: it is a node but also a place. As a node, it is a point of access to trains and, increasingly, to other transportation networks. As a place, it is a specific section of the city with a concentration of infrastructure and a diversified collection of buildings and open spaces (Bertolini, 1998). Moreover, in the last decade new different forms of urban mobility have emerged (sharing mobility, micro-mobility, etc.), but even if they are accessible, low-cost, and green, they are not yet fully integrated into stations’ mobility offer. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge about sustainable cities by focusing on the role of railway stations as infrastructures with the potential of contributing to their development. The research aims to look at different aspects of the topic, such as the urbanistic and architectural aspect, the policy and city governance aspect and the relationships between its stakeholders, the economic aspect focusing on the analysis of the station’s business model and its link with the sustainable or un-sustainable development of the city, and the engineering aspect treating the station as a unique infrastructure in the city with a huge potential in the integration of circular economy.

Alice Lunardon studied Architecture in Rome, Italy, at Università La Sapienza, Facoltà di Architettura “Valle Giulia” (2004-2011), and she graduated with honours with a thesis about hospitals treating the topic with a holistic approach, as she aims to do with the PhD thesis. During her studies, she spent one year in Valencia, Spain, at the UPV University and in Paris, France, at the ENSAV University. Also, she spent 3 months in Paraguay for her Master’s thesis. Successively, she started working in France and she took two Executive Masters in 2018 and 2019, one in Environmental Governance and Policy Making at the IHEID of Geneva, Switzerland, and the other in Sustainable Business at the University of Cambridge, UK. During that period, Alice started developing the research about railway stations as she was also working in the French railways (SNCF), and she had the opportunity to present that research to the European Parliament, and to several international conferences.

Democratization of urban public space – A case study of Turkey‘s „Nation Gardens“

Deniz Köse, since 2021

The doctoral research of Deniz Köse (she/her) investigates democratisation of urban public space through the lens of feminist environmental posthumanities. The research will examine and analyse different approaches in urban public space design as well as explore feminist design strategies within the patriarchal structures of the architectural profession.

This thesis will focus on parks as inherently democratic public green spaces and use Turkey’s rapidly built and spatially immense “Nation Garden” projects as a case study.

Deniz Köse graduated with a Dipl. Ing. from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2014 and later worked at the Institute of Building Biology  Turkey. In 2017, she moved to Munich for work and became a freelancer in architecture. In May 2021, she started her PhD thesis at the Technical University of Munich under the tutelage of Prof. Benedikt Boucsein.

"Empowerment as a strategy for transdisciplinary urban development in Munich neighborhoods"

Mareike Schmidt, since 2022

Mareike Schmidt's dissertation is embedded in the AQT real-world laboratory "Car-reduced neighborhoods for a livable city" as part of the MCube Cluster (Munich Cluster for the Future of Mobility in Metropolitan Regions). In it, Mareike examines from the perspective of architects and urban planners whether the traffic turnaround could not only have much-discussed positive but also negative consequences for the neighborhood. Various phenomena of gentrification have been observed in many restructuring and upgrading projects in other cities. In the context of the transformation of public space in the course of the traffic turnaround, this problem has not yet been examined in detail. In this context, the dissertation project "Empowerment as a strategy of transdisciplinary urban development in Munich neighbourhoods" examines the relevance of the possible negative, socio-geographical effects of the transformation of public space on the neighbourhood and its identity for the practice of architects and, in the next step, investigates the extent to which formats such as real-world laboratories can serve as an element of civic empowerment as a method of urban development in order to raise awareness at an early stage and ultimately actively counteract them.

Mareike Schmidt studied architecture and urban design at the University of Stuttgart and completed her Master of Science in 2016. Before starting her research work at the Chair of Urban Design, she initially worked at UTA Architekten und Stadtplaner in Stuttgart and at bogevischs buero in Munich.Mareike is a registered architect with the Bavarian Chamber of Architects.Parallel to her practical planning activities, she has been teaching at the Chair of Urban Design since 2019.Mareike has been a research assistant since 2021 and is working on her dissertation as part of the AQT real-world laboratory.

Evolutionary geometry in urban landscapes - adaptation, synergies and optimization

Adrian Heinisch, since 2023

Advancing urbanisation is inevitably linked to the health of its inhabitants. In this partly high-density development, infrastructure as a core element of supply also stands as one of the biggest problem areas - it is the source of various significant environmental pollutants.
Infrastructural space is an unattractive, purely functional area for architects and urban planners - an area of short-livedness, but nevertheless irreplaceable. It is the task of today's architects and urban planners to make the urban world more liveable here, to develop decisive interventions and thus to protect health.

A. Heinisch's dissertation includes the development of component activations at various scales and concepts for the built environment near Munich airport. The geometries are partly based on examples from nature, which are adapted three-dimensionally. Strategies include the implementation of vibro-acoustic metamaterials, which are structurally active geometries that can eliminate noise emissions. All concepts are improved using various forms of optimization that reflect evolutionary competition.

A. Heinisch studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich as well as at the Politecnico di Milano. During his bachelor studies he worked as an assistant scientist at the chair of architectural informatics. Afterwards he graduated as Diplom-Ingenieur at the University of Innsbruck, where he specialized for several semesters in acoustics in architecture as well as noise in urban spaces. Within the framework of his project 4Life Buildings he received an award from the Tallinn Biennial. Here he investigated the formation of space by ice and vegetation and developed a structural concept that changes and adapts depending on seasons and climate. In his thesis, he analyzed the implementation of vegetation in combination with resonant geometries to return multi-sensory relevance to the built context. During and after successfully completing his studies, A. Heinisch worked in an architectural office and also engaged in start-up programs where he further developed the approach of his thesis. Since 2023, he has been working on his doctorate at the TU Munich.

Climate-positive urban neighbourhoods - analysis and optimization of planning and approval procedures, considering climate-relevant, energy-related, participative and social challenges.

Vanessa Dörges, since 2023

Climate adaptation and climate protection are key tasks for cities in the future. But how can cities prepare for extreme weather situations at an early stage? How can the building sector contribute to climate protection? What opportunities does the German Building Code (BauGB) offer for climate-friendly and climate-adapted urban planning and redevelopment? In her dissertation, Vanessa examines how climate protection and climate adaptation can be beRer implemented in the BauGB. The aim is to work out possible solu*ons and formulate proposals for the amendment of the BauGB. The research focuses on urban land-use planning and specific urban planning law. The dissertation is integrated into the rain2energy research project, which is being carried out by an interdisciplinary research team from CAE, HSWT, TUM, HCU and TU Dresden as well as experts from the economy.
Vanessa finished her master's degree in urban and regional planning with a focus on urban design at the University of Kassel in 2012. Afterwards, she worked for 9 years in different planning and architecture offices in Bavaria and gained her first teaching experience as a teaching assistant at the Chair of Urban Design from 2019 to 2021. In 2021, she founded her own urban design office in Munich and teaches urban and landscape planning at the university of applied sciences in Weihenstephan-Triesdorf. Since 2023 she is doing her doctorate at TUM in cooperation with HSWT.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Benedikt Boucsein (TUM) und Prof. Dr. Cris*na Lenz (HSWT)
Mentor: Prof. Dr. Simone Linke (HSWT)

Spatial Transformation in the historic district of Centro Habana, Cuba. Understanding Resident Approaches through Architectural Analysis.

Barbara Schudok, since 2023

Buildings in the historical district of Centro Habana were significantly transformed by their residents over the past decades. The main reason for the modification was to generate more living space, especially for growing families needing more space and privacy. Extending and modifying existing living spaces informally became the practical solution because restrictive relocation laws made incremental transformations easier than moving to a bigger apartment due to strict property ownership rules and the challenges of finding a swapping partner through the for a long time only available legal method, „permuta, “ which was complicated and time-consuming. The colonial structures from the late 19th century, with their generous high ceilings, offered great potential to construct extra levels and to double the space while rooftops and courtyards were occupied and extended. Due to Cuba’s complex history and the challenging economic situation, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was challenging to find enough and varied construction materials for private construction projects during the so-called „special period. “ Nevertheless, residents adapted their houses incrementally and often improvised with accessible materials to make the most of the available space to create privacy and comfort. These self-made modifications significantly changed the original structure of the colonial houses, so they were gradually taken over by the informal transformation of their residents. The reorganization of the interior is reflected all over Centro Habana in the exterior through additional balconies, split doors, and adjusted windows, to name just a few. While these interventions might have improved living conditions, they have influenced the building due to increased weight loads, the creative but sometimes inappropriate use of materials, and reduced ventilation from additional walls and levels. Furthermore, the buildings are reaching the end of their natural life cycle, and the humid climate, salty air, and storms exacerbate their deterioration, which can often even lead to collapse.
This research conceptualizes the ongoing transformation process by examining how it has affected the spatial configuration of buildings in Centro Habana and the role of informality when it operates in consolidated areas, a current knowledge gap in this area. A typical street in the district will be analyzed to understand residents' approaches, influences, and responses to these challenges. Current building layouts are compared with archived planning materials to illustrate how these changes have affected the arrangement of built spaces through architectural tools such as plans, sections, elevations, sketches, and scans. This comparison aims to better understand and document the ongoing changes within the 3.5 square kilometer area of Centro Habana, which is home to approximately 41,000 people. The study focuses on a historic city in a socialist state and aims to contribute to the understanding of the widespread phenomenon of transformation in cities of the South through the case of Centro Habana.
Barbara studied architecture and urban planning at the University of Stuttgart, Universidad de Sevilla, and Technical University of Munich from 2010 to 2017. With a focus on international projects and informal developments, she participated in workshops worldwide, including Cuba, Malawi, Tanzania, Egypt, and Italy. She gained professional experience while working for Foster + Partners, London, HENN, Munich, and as a freelancer for Kéré Architecture, Berlin. In summer semester 2018 she joined the Chair of Architectural Design and Participation of Prof. Kéré as a Research Associate and began working for TUM.Africa in August 2018, focusing on cooperation with KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana, and teaching. Barbara has maintained a long-term research interest in Centro Habana, Cuba, starting with her Master's thesis. Since 2019, she has been part of the teaching team of the Caribbean Winterschool, an international workshop in Havana, and since 2022, she has been a visiting lecturer at the architecture faculties of Polytechnic José Antonio Echeverría [CUJAE] in Havana, the Universidad de Camagüey and the Münster School of Architecture. Since 2023, she has been working on her doctoral thesis at the Technical University of Munich, supervised by Prof. Dr. Benedikt Boucsein and mentored by Prof. Dr. Jorge Peña Díaz, CUJAE.