After successful completion of the course, students are able to understand cities as forerunners of social change and as centres of political and economic changes of the last millennia. They are generally informed about the prevailing dynamics of the urban living space and in particular about the developments of the urban fringe areas, which are characterised by suburbanisation and structural change. The students should recognise that it is increasingly necessary to understand planning as a dynamic development process. They are also able to work on complex design tasks from the field of urban planning independently, systematically and with an original, contemporary design approach based on a precise design language. They have the competence to recognise fields of action in the urban context and to develop corresponding urban planning solutions. The students are able to conduct independent research and collect topic-related basics. They are able to create design concepts and to comprehensively present them in the form of strategy, design and detail plans.
25 years of Zwischenstadt
In the past summer semester, four universities (TU Munich, Bauhaus University Weimar, University of Luxembourg, TU Vienna) turned their gaze away from urban centers to places on the urban periphery. In various seminars and design studios, students dealt with the complex issues of the Zwischenstadt, 25 years after the publication of Thomas Sievert's book of the same name. This November, an exhibition at the TU Munich will show the results of this engagement with the urban periphery. The aim is to confront and discuss the reflection on place and world, space and time, urban and rural with the observations and positions on the Zwischenstadt experienced by the participants themselves. The design studio "25 Years Zwischenstadt - Vienna’s Periphery: Experiences, Observations, Design Principles" concludes a series of courses that have dealt with the northeastern outskirts of Vienna at the Department of Urban Design.
Context Vienna
Vienna's northeast has been subject to radical change in recent decades. A productive agricultural landscape with embedded Angerdörfern developed into a heterogeneous, fragmented urban landscape. Although the agricultural heritage of the region is still omnipresent here on the edge of the Marchfeld, monofunctional residential quarters, commercial areas and sprawling single-family housing estates have spread out in many places between orchards, vineyards and fields. Some of Vienna's major urban development areas are located here: over the next few decades, thousands of new apartments are to be built on vacant lots in Floridsdorf and Donaustadt. The heated debates surrounding the consturctuon of the highway-like “Stadtstraße” and the canceled project of a highway-tunnel through the national park Donauauen brought the possible effects of this development to the attention of a broad public. They shine a spotlight on this seemingly decades-old best practice of urban development, of parcel-focused planning built on motorized individual transport and the creation of the structures required for it, and ask what alternatives there might be to this approach.
Mapping Vienna's Northeast
Based on the reading of Thomas Sievert's book “Zwischenstadt”, we want to draw a (hand-)drawn summary of the work of the last one and a half years. Together, we will work on a large-scale map of Vienna's northeastern outskirts in October, which will bring together our thoughts, observations, research, and synthesis of the design approaches of the past years. The map will be part of our contribution to the Zwischenstadt exhibition at the TU Munich and thus presented to a larger audience in mid-November.
Timetable
Oct. 4., 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.: Kick-off
Oct. 4, 6 - 8 p.m.: final presentation Module 2022S
Oct. 11, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.: Discussion, research & review, concept-finding, sketches. Oct. 18, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.: Mapping Workshop
Oct. 25, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m. Mapping Workshop
Nov. 8, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. Finalization Mapping
Nov. 18, tba: exhibition opening Munich
