Project description:
As an integral part of the Horizon Europe framework beginning in 2021, the following five areas have been chosen as EU missions: Adaptation to Climate Change, including Societal Transformation; Cancer; Healthy Oceans, Seas, Coastal and Inland Waters; Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities; Soil Health and Food.
This project is built on the foundation of these EU missions and aims to develop future solutions for a more inclusive, healthy and smarter state of Thuringia.
Planning for urban growth or (re)growth is an objective for many planners and policy makers in our current era. In growing urban areas, investments flow in for securing richer profit margins, developers are attracted by the uprising real estate markets, and young graduates are attracted by various dazzling opportunities to further their careers. However, many European cities are, in fact, shrinking in population and probably will not grow in the near future. As a result, policy makers are beginning to acknowledge that shrinking is inevitable in many cities and must be embraced. Since 1989, around 500,000 people have left Thuringia, and by 2035, 34.4 percent of the population will be 65 or older. When shrinking has become a normality in the state of Thuringia, will Thuringia be fully prepared to be an age-friendly state, able to transform the negative effects of declining population into positive opportunities?
In this project, we are studying why depopulation has been occurring and how it has been impacting the state of Thuringia and its inhabitants. We will also be exploring effective solutions of smart shrinking in terms of addressing demographic, political, and social-economic changes.
We will study the complexity around rural-suburban-urban dynamic in the state of Thuringia with different scales. On the regional scale, we will look at regional planning perspectives in which policy makers and planners come up with cohesive and integrated strategic visions. On the local neighborhood scale, we will look at how these visions will be implemented.
This project consists of two parts: preliminary research and design proposals. You will exercise your research skills with various analytical tools in preliminary research in order to determine effective parameters for the selected EU missions. Based on the preliminary findings, you will develop a scenario targeting particular problems to be solved with urban design proposals.
The overall goal of this project is to invent future solutions for shrinking cities in the state of Thuringia that correspond to the EU missions. |
