How can architectural education enable students to move beyond receiving lecture content and toward the co-production of transferable urban design knowledge? The Urban Stories Lecture Series is developing an active-learning framework that links lectures, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, and an emerging e-platform. Students shift from passive recipients of content to active co-producers of knowledge, contributing to the development of an Urban Design Toolbox.
In the workshop, student groups choose a city and conduct a comprehensive investigation on its history, current challenges, and future opportunities through case-based research. They identify and formalize context-specific Urban Design Tools using analytical drawings, critical briefs, and curated socio-environmental data. The workshop builds students’ competencies in systems thinking, collaboration, evidence-based reasoning, and visual communication.
The Your Urban Stories exhibition translates semester outputs into a curated public narrative. Student work is presented as a comparative account of urban conditions, design strategies, and socio-environmental questions worldwide. Exhibition design becomes part of the pedagogy, as students learn to communicate complex research in accessible visual and spatial formats.
Supported by ETH Innovendum PAKETH-Edition, the Urban Design Toolbox (UDT) Platform extends this cumulative learning model across time. The platform consolidates more than a decade of teaching outputs into an open, interactive environment where users can map, filter, compare, and revisit tools across regions, scales, and themes, while linking entries to a georeferenced world map. The platform will be developed by the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design (Prof. Klumpner) in partnership with the IVIA Lab – Interactive Visualization & Intelligence Augmentation Lab at ETH Zurich, led by Prof. Mennatallah El-Assady.
Across all components, the framework is structured through ESG factors (Environment, Social, Governance), SDGs (especially SDG 11), and thematic clusters such as dwelling, moving, nurturing, and generating. These shared lenses help students read cities as complex systems, assess trade-offs, and test the limits of transferability, supporting a research-driven pedagogy for inclusive and regenerative urban futures.
Prof. Hubert Klumpner is a full Professor at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), where he holds the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design and is co-founder of the interdisciplinary design practice U-TT. As Design Principal and CEO of Zurich-based Urbanthinktank_next, he is counted among the originators of the turn to socio-environmental design – a movement that had its international breakthrough with the exhibition, ‚Small-Scale Big Change – New Architectures of Social Engagement‘ at the MoMA in New York City in 2010.
Dr. Fernando Túlio Salva Rocha Franco is a lecturer and scientific researcher at ETH Zurich, working with the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), and the Network City and Landscape (NSL), who coordinates the Innovendum project.
Chen Shen is a doctoral researcher at the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zurich. His dissertation project, Deconstructing Urban Village, investigates the formation and transformation of urban villages in Shenzhen through the lens of power dynamics among various social groups. He is also actively involved in the Urban Stories Lecture Series, especially in the section of the Pearl River Delta.
Moyosola Oke is a student assistant in Urban Stories Lecture Series (Chair of Architecture and Urban Design)
Gaia Banfi is a student assistant in Urban Stories Lecture Series (Chair of Architecture and Urban Design)
