Urban Development

Spatial Development is the product of the interplay between territorial and functional logic. On the one hand there are targets, objectives, and actions of government institutions. On the other hand there are functional drivers of (economic) development and the resulting location requirements. The convergence and overlapping of these two types of logic spawn both stimulating incentives and conflicts. From a socio-economic and spatial perspective we regard these phenomena as being constitutive for research and teaching at the school of architecture.

Public and private approaches need to be analysed from the point of view of their mutually dependent, functional framework, which leads to different spatial analysis levels. The aim is here to better understand conditions and consequences of urban interventions on different scales as well as resources and potentials of these interventions for spatial development.

The Department focuses its attention on metropolitan regions of European dimensions, "Mega-City Regions", which emerge due to increasing functional cross-linkage. They form the interface between global networks and local, innovative milieus in the expanding knowledge economy. In Mega-City Regions it is the management and control function, the gateway function – Munich Airport, for example – and the innovative function that play a crucial role.

Analysis on its own is not enough to design sustainable residential and business areas in metropolitan environments. What is needed is process-based interaction between awareness, products and processes. The creation of a problem and protagonist awareness is the prerequisite for developing suitable measures and solutions (or products) in individual, sectorial / thematic fields – to be followed up by the selection and development of appropriate regulation processes for their implementation. Analysis, visualisation and communication should be understood as methodical modules in this chain.

Our mission statement documents the need and the desire to transdisciplinary work between architecture and landscape architecture, urban planning, regional planning and economic geography. A coherent and effective spatial strategy for a place brings these disciplines together, creating added value and deriving results for the design, implementation and communication from the spatial analysis. The Chair of Urban Development explores these complementary methodological approaches of the disciplines involved and brings them into discussion.

News

Last week we shared with the documentary filmmakers our perspectives on the “Bilbao effect”, evidence of social, economic and media effects of star architecture as well as the interplays between social media and architecture. It is important to disseminate insights into scientific research beyond academic journals. Not only can we reach a wider public, but it forces…

Measuring the City: The Power of Urban Metrics. Does the online circulation of photographs influence the image of a city? The iconicity of an exceptional architectural project might have distinct transformative effects. See our analysis of Flickr and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.

As part of a Special Issue in the Architectural Theory Review on the Architecture of Global Governance, this article focuses on Google, a Big Tech company that wields unprecedented influence, including in the realm of governance. Using qualitative content analysis of media of Google’s proposed project for a headquarters in Mountain View, California, the article shows…

Which locations do knowledge-intensive firms choose in Munich and how do these decisions change over a ten-year period? These questions are addressed in a new article in the current issue of the journal disP - The Planning Review entitled "Linking knowledge-intensive firm locations with the urban structure of the city of Munich". The paper analyses the locations of…

The article, in a Special Issue on Regional Design of Planning Practice & Research, explores why despite growing academic recognition of the usefulness of regional design for regional coordination and rescaling from the bottom up, the response of practitioners in spatial planning and governance at regional scales remains unclear. To investigate how practitioners…

CALL for IDEAS

will PROXIMITY sill MATTER? between space, function + process

Interdisciplinary project "Mühldorf 2053" - Documentation of student works now available

Abstract This paper analyzes how positional and relational data in 186 regions of Germany influence the location choices of knowledge-based firms. Where firms locate depends on specific local and interconnected resources, which are unevenly distributed in space. This paper presents an innovative way to study such firm location decisions through network analysis that…

As part of the TUM Project Week, the Chair of Urban Development and the TUM Venture Lab Built Environment organized the seminar "Urban Futures Thinking" from January 9 to 13. In the Design Sprint, students from different disciplines worked on the future of urban spaces using the Tucherpark in Munich as an example. Methodology, process and results of the project week…

This paper challenges the traditional perspective of a territorial core–periphery pattern as an organizing principle of space by introducing a relational perspective through an empirical approach. We study spatial processes of knowledge creation among advanced producer services in Germany between 2009 and 2019. We use a unique longitudinal dataset to analyse if German…