Integrated Research and Design Project II – Integrated Urbanism: Activate Your City!

This Design Studio is offered in cooperation with ILPÖ

Integrated Research and Design Project II – Integrated Urbanism: Activate Your City!

Stuttgart is the sixth largest German city and its metropolitan area is the country’s fourth largest. It provides its citizens with a high quality of living, nevertheless, there are challenges that need to be addressed in order to find a sustainable vision for the city. How can Stuttgart push transformation towards a socially just, culturally diverse and ecologically responsible city? The challenge is, to develop a strategic plan for long term transformation concepts for a neighborhood of Stuttgart’s city center and to boost civic actor engagement. The IRD II project will be executed in cooperation with local stakeholders in order to give students the chance to participate in a real life work experience.

The Integrated Research and Design Studios (IRD) aim to involve students in complex and transdisciplinary projects allowing for creative and strategic alliances and relationships among various stakeholders. These alliances are seen as the basis for innovative environmental and urban planning approaches. The course is designed to prepare the next generation of urban practitioners to integrate new modes of research and design into practice.

In the course of this project, we will analyze the city center of Stuttgart and its urban, social and infrastructural fabric.
We will look into the topics of climate, energy, land-use, current statistics, and include policy and administration, as well as planning and participation under the headline of strategic development concept. The main focus is to develop strategies that help to transform the city center into an attractive quarter that provides a wide range of public infrastructure for a diverse community within a sustainable urban environment.

Learning outcomes:
This Module seeks to foster the following issues:
• Approach to apply research and design methods
• Bridging practice and theory
• Development of a creative strategic plan with integrated approach including utopian scenarios
• Learn about modes of actor engagement and participation
• Independent working culture in groups
• Ability to contextualize projects and set them in relation to theoretical and practical debates
• Working within a public context
• Experiment and communicate 1:1 action in a real-life project

First meeting: 09 April 2019, 11:00h in IUSD Studio