Cultural Landscapes & Urban Resilience

Discover the various aspects of the built environment and learn how to develop more resilient cities!

In this two-week intensive course, you will get a deep insight into the influence of human-made and natural factors on the built environment and develop responsive planning schemes for more resilient cities. You will learn about various aspects of urban resilience from an environmental as well as a cultural perspective, using different tools, scientific methods, and analysis, including GIS techniques.

How to encounter natural hazards with reactive urban spaces

Faced with the robustness and readiness of our built environment and the challenges for society to cope with the vulnerability of these circumstances, urban resilience is often difficult to assess when it comes to its integration and implementation in everyday reality. In order to take unexpected occurrences of natural hazards – such as earthquakes, floods or droughts – into account and to become reactive in the built space, disciplines related to spatial development are increasingly important.

Acquire an interdisciplinary and transcultural perspective for an integrated urban design approach

Next to the building-related knowledge about vulnerability and preventive or adaptive measures, the process and acceptance of these measures are depending on cultural values. In this course, the overarching topic of urban resilience will therefore be treated with a transcultural perspective. Furthermore, the process of change that forms the cultural landscapes for urban resilience requires an interdisciplinary approach that takes diverse aspects for building schemes and planning processes into account. In this course, you will learn how to develop such an integrated urban design approach.

From basic knowledge to specific case studies

The course includes lectures on more general approaches to integrated urban development and urban sustainability but also takes a closer look at urban resilience in the context of climate-sensitive planning by analysing urban heat islands and different building typologies and urban patterns. Part of the programme is GIS training and application to map such heat islands of informal and formal housing areas, using a practical, illustrative case study. Based on these findings, you will get the chance to create practical design solutions that respond to urban heat in the physical, cultural, and social context.

The course content at a glance

The course will systematically approach an understanding of urban resilience that both connects man-made as well as natural conditions in the urban context, including scales from the urban to the building level.

• Setting parameters for urban resilience
• The complexity of Integrated Urban Development Concepts and the realities
• Analytical approaches to urban heat islands (neighbourhood level and larger)
• Societal ideals and the impact of urban green on the urban environment
• Drawing out a comparative study between informal and formal settlements
• Learn how affected areas can be connected to user-oriented systems
• Consequences from the case study for integrative planning schemes

Next to planning in an interdisciplinary and transnational context, the workshop offers different options to learn about different approaches and urban typologies and to assess them in a broader perspective for finally being able to shape and design in different geographical and cultural systems.