After successful completion of the course, students are able to...
... understand cities as pioneers of social change and as centers of political and economic change over the last millennia. They will be generally informed about the prevailing dynamics of the urban habitat and specifically about the interrelationships and interdependencies of mobility, spatial, landscape and urban planning with architectural concepts. Students should recognize that it is increasingly necessary to understand planning as a dynamic development process. Furthermore, they are 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 recognize fields of action in the urban context and to develop corresponding urban planning solutions on different scales. The students are able to conduct independent research and to gather basic information on specific topics. They are able to create design concepts and to comprehensively present and illustrate them in the form of strategy, design and detail plans. The main topics of this semester are production, global and local production networks, rail infrastructure, logistics, trade and their spatial context.
Where will we produce and how will we transport tomorrow?
In the context of the integrative design "Vienna's flows of goods" we want to explore together the question of how places along supply chains can be designed in the future. The majority of today's commodity production is articulated in globally fragmented production systems, which are CO2-intensive and crisis-prone, not least due to transport, and also reproduce spatial inequality. It seems more urgent than ever to critically question the global interdependence of raw material extraction, production, logistics and distribution and to locate systems more locally and regionally again. The transportation sector also needs a transportation turnaround. Within the framework of integrative design, railroads and their interconnection with other modes of transport are therefore the focus of our observation.
Supervised by an interdisciplinary team consisting of people from the research fields of urban planning, landscape architecture and transport planning, as well as from the City of Vienna, the students develop concepts for places and routes of goods production: What could the places of production look like in a future shaped by climate change? How do those of further processing and trade look like? Where are they located? How are raw materials and goods transported and distributed between these places? And how do these areas and infrastructures integrate into the (urban) landscape?
To find answers to these questions, we examine existing commercial and industrial areas in the Vienna Metropolitan Region and the rail infrastructure as their primary connecting network.
Working method
The design process begins with the development of a concept based on research into spaces of commodity production and circulation and their relationship to architecture, urban planning, infrastructure and their regulatory context. Starting from production plants in the metropolitan area of Vienna, the local to global (up to Trieste, Piraeus, China) functional-spatial contexts will be identified, their current spatial configuration will be analyzed and new considerations will be made as to how these places can be transformed in a changed world of production and work. The integration of production plants and areas into their spatial context and the rethinking of their spatial configuration is at the center of the treatment. After all, these areas, which today are designed according to the logics of production methods and truck drag curves, cover large parts of our settlement space, are places of work and residence, and thus the everyday spatial reality of many people.
The students develop individual projects, which are coordinated in groups of three. Different scale levels are to be worked on: from global transport chains, urban reconfiguration of industrial areas and their infrastructural integration and typological considerations of individual production plants to loading ramps along sidings and multimodal transshipment points.
Weekly corrections, intensive workshops, interim presentations, final submission. The proof of performance is immanent. I.e. both the cooperation during all course units at the TU, as well as the continuous work between these units, as well as the quality of these and the final delivery are used to determine the grade.
