Online SPS Seminar with Tanja Herdt (TU Delft).
Topic: on social life and urban form
Based on examples taken from both practice and research in urban design, the seminar will focus on the impact of the current structural and social changes on city design. The goal is an open discussion about the question of how interdisciplinary design practice may contribute to successful urban transformation.
Specifically, three design challenges will be addressed that play a central role in the future development of cities:
- The future of urban growth:
The demand for the compact city and the focus on spatial qualities.
- The challenge of demography:
The demand for new forms of housing and change of urban typologies.
- The idea of the open and inclusive city:
To what extent and by which means can urban design help making more widely available a city’s opportunities and benefits.
Addressing these challenges, one has to take into account the particulars of each city or neighborhood. Consequently, we cannot hope for a single approach that could prove reliably successful. Instead, we have to rethink both the scope and the processes of a design project.
Tanja Herdt is Associate Professor of Theory and Methods of Urban Design and section leader in the department of Urbanism at TU-Delft. She is both an academic and a practicing urban designer with an emphasis on urban transformation, methods of urban analysis, and history and theory of the city. Tanja Herdt studied architecture and urban design in Germany, and received her doctorate from the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Before joining the faculty at TU-Delft, she worked at the research centre ETH-Wohnforum, ETH-CASE, as the head of research for sustainable settlement design. Her work on the British architect Cedric Price and the changing legacy of modern functionalism was published under the title The City and the Architecture of Change at Park Books, ISBN 978-3-03860-045-9.
