Topics

• Urban development and design 
• urban planning and infrastructure 
• urban ecosystems 
• certification urban districts 
• urban design

The requirements of sustainable urban development and landscape planning, and the relationships between city, surrounding countryside and region have changed in light of increasing urbanisation worldwide and the rise in land use, climate change and the shortage of resources, as well as an increase in pollution. Serious changes in technology and society have played an important role. The significance of public as well as private outdoor space within the urban structure has also changed under the conditions of postindustrial society. The goal must be to meet diverse needs without neglecting social, economic, environmental, design-spatial, traffic or infrastructure aspects.

The focus of this module's teaching is the application of learned content toward a specific urban design developed as a semester project. The design task consists of the exemplary, contentually and conceptually sound development of an ecological urban district, which takes into special consideration aesthetic and creative factors.

Students will possess the following competences upon successful completion of this module:

• The ability to conceptually, methodically, and effectively carry out ecological urban planning and to assess it
• The ability to act based on the knowledge of social contexts and to work with clients and operators who represent the requirements and demands of society
• The ability to develop project documents based on the definition of the needs of society, clients and operators, and to research and define correlated and functional requirements for diverse types of built environments
• An understanding of the history and practice of urban design, landscape planning, as well as area and regional planning, and their connection to local and global demography and the utilisation of given natural resources
• Knowledge of design theory and methodolgy
• An understanding of designprocedures and processes
• Knowledge of precedents in design as well as architectural criticism
• The ability to recognise problems in integrated building which takes into consideration aspects of environmental sustainability and to develop solutions based on sub or overall concepts.