Our world is on the move. We have to face an enormous urbanization with already a majority of people living in dense urban settlements, and prognosis says this quota may rise up to 70% in 2050. This growth gets even stronger by diverse kinds of migration. There are not only the refugees moving globally, but there is also a huge and growing number of employees on the regional and national levels that are forced to change their main site of being, by the simple necessity to make their living and for the scarceness of local jobs. Both the global migration flows and the moving employees really increase the demand of flats, but also for basic infrastructure services for health, education and the local supply of daily needs.
In Vienna e.g., the past years brought an average population growth of about 25,000 people annually. Although the City administration is really among the most active Cities in Europe with the construction of new flats[1], anyway the gap between supply and demand of flats gets larger and larger. The problem is not only the unsatisfying additional number of flats, but also the share of affordable housing, which is shrinking year by year for market and price developments.
This means that those demands cannot be served with new houses alone, but with much more activities in re-densifying and mobilizing the existing building stock, which covers clearly more than 90% of our built environment. Disciplines like Spatial Planning, Architecture and Engineering have to deal with this complex challenge in an interdisciplinary way. Also, in terms of private services and sharing activities, we can witness a lot of activities in the past years (both non-commercial NGO/neighbourhood activities and commercial services as UBER or Air BnB), but their ¿drive¿ just isn¿t enough to foster more permanent or temporarily used flats for all kinds of the ¿Nomads¿ described before.
[1] In the past years, around 8,000 flats per year were built in Vienna, which equals the demand of around 16,000 people. See http://www.bmwfw.gv.at/Wirtschaftspolitik/Wohnungspolitik/Documents/Zahlen%20Daten%20und%20Fakten%20-%20Endbericht.pdf and https://www.wien.gv.at/stadtentwicklung/strategien/step/step05/download/pdf/step-kapitel4-3.pdf
The international student workshop in Vienna ¿ before the SCUPAD Congress in Salzburg ¿ will focus on the understanding the dynamics, gaps and limitations of human displacement to cities around the world, and especially spatial impacts of displacement at the local level. The workshop will focus on the requirements, the creation and the activation of spaces needed to shape our cities and regions as places for integration, rather than separation and exclusion. In short, we shall try to understand how cities can contribute for socio-economic integration of newly arrived citizens.
We will work on concrete examples in the city of Vienna dealing with topics as affordable housing, public space and urbanisation in an international context and discussed by interdisciplinary groups (e.g. urban and regional planners, social scientists, transport planners and architects).
What can we do in our work for and with cities, municipalities and regions? How can we strengthen a positive attitude in the debate about immigration and integration? What¿s the spatial contribution of spatial planning to a migrant-inclusive society?
Our workshop will work in this interesting, but complex field around the transformation and mobilization of existing buildings (in use and empty ones), the re-densification potentials around already interesting public spaces, but with a lot of respect on the cooperation aspects to make the solutions stable and repeatable.
The workshop and the lecture outcomes may be of various and open kind- anything else, or ¿ordered¿ result would not match the topics to deal with. Possible results are scenario posters, movies, public space events, radio features or other formats that have to be developed by the students during the course. Petra Hirschler, Michael Rieper and Hartmut Dumke are experienced Coaches to care for a sound mix of scenario sites, outcome products and a matching work schedule to carry this out in time. Pre-results of the workshop will be also presented during the SCUPAD congress in Salzburg, directly after the main workshop in Vienna. This gives the students interesting feedbacks to finalize their works during the remaining semester.
The workshop will be held in cooperation with the TU Delft, University of Liverpool and SCUPAD (Salzburg Congress on urban planning and development, www.scupad.org).
The international student workshop will be held in Vienna, May 4th-10th in the future lab st. marx.
Application open till March 3rd 2017: Please send one picture and story (max. 300
words) related to the topic to petra.hirschler@tuwien.ac.at
