Seminar on International Urban Design Cases: 

Urban Design Cases. Elaborating urban design themes and processes in different contexts 

Team: Bahar Gedikli,  Isabel Glogar

Introduction: Monday 17th of October 2022, 15.00h, Raum 3350

Urban design is about shaping the built and open areas in cities, deciding on morphological features, and identifying solid-void relationships, where city planners, architects, landscape architects, and other relevant experts are involved and collaborate with each other at varying spatial scales. It refers to both the “process” of design with its actors, approaches and methods, and “substantive outputs”, namely formation of the physical urban environment. The seminar aims at elaborating different urban design cases across the world with a focus on both of these aspects; involving contemporary design themes and issues at different spatial scales ranging from city-to-neigborhood-to-building scales. The examples will portray different planning and design approaches and methods, actors involved, and outputs achieved. With this content, students will be provided with an in-depth understanding of the built environment, contemporary urban design themes and problems in different contexts, knowledge of planning hierarchy, representation of decisions at city and neighborhood/district scales. 

The seminar will be organized as a series of presentations with lecturers from international context, each presenting a seminar on an urban design/planning theme with process and output aspects. The topics to be covered in the seminar series refer to a large variety of design subjects ranging from ecological approaches to design, climate change, sustainability, urban green infrastructure, urban mobility, urban transformation, adaptive re-use and industrial heritage, strategic planning, planning regulations, and so on. Students are expected to participate in class discussions by the end of each presentation. At the end of the semester, they will be asked to prepare a poster on an urban design case to present in the class. The evaluation will be through their attendance and active participation (30%) and the case study analysis in form of a poster work (70%).

Bahar Gedikli is Professor at the Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of City and Regional Planning and Academic Guest of the Professorship of Urban Design in Wintersemester 2022/23