Seminar on International Urban Design Cases organized with the Professorships PhD candidates

Urban Design Cases - Actors, Processes and Design Strategies in International Contexts. From Future Aspects to Challenges 

Team: Isabel Glogar, Benedikt Boucsein, Vanessa Dörges, Elif Simge Fettahoglu, Adrian Heinisch, Deniz Köse, Sypros Kouloris, Alice Lunardon, Ayesha Müller-Wolfertshofer, Mareike Schmidt

Introduction: 23rd of October 2023, 15.00h, Seminarraum UD (3350)

In approximate 100 days we will travel around international cases exploring actors, processes and design strategies as well as challenges and future aspects within different urban design examples. The course centers on insights from international guests and will focus on ecological strategies, gender perspectives, mobility, bottom-up perspectives and more. The seminar relies on a strong discursive aspect.

Urban design is about theorizing, planning and shaping the built environment and urban spaces, integrating morphological features, and identifying relationships, where architects, urban planners, landscape architects, and other relevant experts as well as stakeholders, politicians and citizens are involved and collaborate with each other at varying spatial scales and processes.

It refers to both the “process” of design with its actors, approaches and methods, and “substantive outputs”, namely formation of the physical urban environment. The seminar aims at elaborating different urban design cases across the world with a focus on both of these aspects; involving contemporary design themes and issues at different spatial scales ranging from city-to-neigborhood-to-building scales. The examples will portray different planning and design approaches and methods, actors involved, and outputs achieved. With this content, students will be provided with an in-depth understanding of the built environment, contemporary urban design challenges, aspects as well as theories in different contexts, representation of decisions at city and neighborhood/district scales. 

The seminar will be organized as a series of presentations, discussions and workshops with lecturers and practitioners from the international context, each presenting an insight on an urban design case, urban theory or urban planning theme with process and output aspects. The topics to be covered in the seminar series refer to a large variety of urban design subjects ranging from ecological approaches to design, climate change, sustainability, urban green infrastructure, urban mobility, urban transformation, adaptive re-use and industrial heritage, strategic planning, planning regulations, and so on. Students are expected to participate in class discussions.. At the end of the semester, they will be asked to prepare a poster (group of 2) on an urban design case to present in the class as well as to participate in the UD exhibition. The evaluation will be through their attendance and active participation (30%) and the case study analysis in form of a poster work (70%).

Contact: Isabel Glogar (isabel.glogar@tum.de)