Aktuelle Projekte

Some of East-German and Portuguese cities have been experiencing rapid changes in the run of processes that can be marked as "post-industrialism".  Although Portugal has been deeply formed as an peripherical country, urban planning of the Lisbon city and other cities has been realized in the 20th century in the run of industrial needs (like the harbour economy).

Nevertheless we observe the lost of importance of the heavy industry and industry based in intensive exploitation of labour-force and the growth of the services. East-German cities are undergoing profound changes after the Fall of the Wall and are still in a transitory changes where only few cities like Leipzig have built up a substantial service sector economy. They experience other major trends in society like demographic changes and multi-culturalism, Lisbon and the East-German cities are experiencing a multi-layered transition in rapid time.

Against the background of these observations, this project has as objective to create an intensified knowledge of contemporary urban development in Portugal and East Germany. It creates a common research framework where interdisciplinary approaches are intended to give a detailed insight into both general trends and particular projects. It focuses than on the new role of public space in cities facing the transformation to a post-industrial and service sector led urban economy. In a third step, the project highlights the different strategies in political programmes, architectural approaches, urban planning and social and artistic interventions with regard to the renewal of urban areas.

Global restructuring and urbanisation presents a great challenge for urban and regional planning and highlights a pressing need for sustainable planning strategies. Current sustainable strategies focus on development concepts such as re-densification, mixed use approaches and polycentrality, which are primarily the result of economic and ecological considerations. This research project aims to provide a methodical instrument that takes into account the social dimension of sustainability by making it possible to assess current models of urban planning from the viewpoint of social sustainability and from these to develop new types of planning concepts.

Simulation techniques such as agent-based models and graphic-based analytical procedures help to reveal new ways of approaching relevant planning issues. By combining these with small-scale empirical data it is possible to investigate the effects of built structure on the spatial organisation of inhabitants and vice versa. Through a comparison of simulation models and empirical data, one should be able to derive theoretical concepts which can in turn be used to evaluate specific built structures. Such concepts can then be used as a basis for generative software that can provide recommendations for sustainable approaches to urban planning.

The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Do 551/18-1)