Sehr geehrte Leserinnen und Leser
Um urbane Qualität zu sichern und entwickeln beschreiben wir Landschaftstypen, schildern das Beispiel Langstrasse Zürich, entwickeln Strategien für öffentliche Räume in ehemaligen Krisengebieten und folgen RadfahrerInnen auf ihrer Route. Derweil geht Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete gegen das Vergessen in der Architektur an, in unserem Interview erfahren Sie wie.
Wir wünschen viel informatives Lesevergnügen.
Um die Qualität von Landschaften sowohl im urbanen als auch im ländlichen Raum zu sichern und gemäss entsprechenden Zielen zu entwickeln, ist eine flächendeckende Beschreibung der vorhandenen Landschaftstypen nötig. Diese dient als Grundlage zur Festlegung von Entwicklungszielen, zur Ausscheidung von besonders schützenswerten Gebieten sowie zur Beobachtung der längerfristigen Entwicklung der Landschaften.
Urbane Qualitäten sind heute in der Schweiz zu einem wichtigen Thema geworden. Fragen der Verdichtung, des Umgangs mit der Zersiedlung, der nachhaltigen Entwicklung, aber auch die steigende Nachfrage nach urbanem Wohnen und Arbeiten haben die Frage aufgeworfen, wie sich heute urbane Quartiere neu bauen lassen. Dabei lässt sich von der Zürcher Langstrassse einiges lernen. Diesen Fragen geht eine Ausstellung im kürzlich eröffneten Zentrum Architektur Zürich (ZAZ) im Museum Bellerive nach.
Daily news headlines inform us about crises situations due to conflict and economic issues leading to soaring hunger and mass emigrations in various parts of the world. The ongoing research efforts at our chair in post-conflict Colombia, post-apartheid South Africa, and Ex-Yugoslavia focuses on creating synergies between city, research and integrative design strategies in the built environment.
As interest in cycling as a mode of transport rises concurrently with a rise in bicycle traffic volumes in Germany, modeling cyclists’ decisions gains importance. A recently completed online survey shows that in addition to commonly considered attributes like pavement type, the urban design characteristics «complexity» and «streetscape design» also have an effect on cyclists’ decisions to choose one route over another.
Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete from the chair for History and Theory of Urban Design is now part of the NSL. Learn in our interview how he investigates the basis of the discipline, brings non-Western experiences to the spotlight, and provides a basis for dealing with contemporary urban issues.
ETH Zurich has launched the ETH Mobility Initiative together with the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) as first partner to further expand research and education in the area of mobility. The call for new partners and proposals is now open. Within this framework, a long-term research programme is being established aiming at bringing together competences from academic and industrial research in the field of future mobility. The overarching goal is to develop solutions that address grand challenges like the decarbonisation, digitalisation and development of the infrastructure in the coming decades. Should you be interested in supporting this project and become a partner of the initiative, please contact the ETH Foundation. The 2nd call for proposals is open 15 February to 6 May 2019.
PuSH, a large, innovative European research project, has achieved funding from the EU HERA programme Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe (2019–2022). Distinguished researchers and non-academic partners from Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and Italy have achieved success in the face of fierce international competition, receiving €1 million from the EU HERA programme for the collaborative research project Public Space in European Social Housing (PuSH). The project aims to push forward our knowledge about the integration processes and cultural encounters that take place in shared spaces on social housing estates in Europe.
Swiss Federal Council member Ignazio Cassis visited the site of the Empower Shack Project in the township of Khayelitsha in South Africa, meeting Prof. Hubert Klumpner on site. Together with the Swiss Ambassador, they spoke at length about the project’s potential to reshape housing policy in post-apartheid South Africa. The Empower Shack project aims to reshape the approach to informal settlement upgrading by offering an innovative and inclusive methodology for the fair distribution of public space, delivery of basic services, and an urbanization scheme that combines housing upgrades with a safer urban environment and new economic and social possibilities. He posted about it later on in his social media account.
Bewerbungsfenster: 1. Januar bis 30. April 2019.
Die Raumplanung in der Schweiz steht vor grossen Herausforderungen. Revision und Umsetzung des Raumplanungsgesetzes samt Integration der Infrastrukturen sind wichtige Themen der aktuellen politischen Diskussion. Zentrales Anliegen ist eine nachhaltige Gestaltung und Nutzung unseres Lebensraumes.
Application window until 30 June 2019.
The MAS ETH in Housing is committed to contribute to finding solutions to the housing challenges in Switzerland, Europe, as well as in low and middle income countries globally through multi disciplinary training and highlevel research.
This is a selection. Find a complete list in the ETH Zürich Research Collection.
When it comes to predicting inter-municipal commuting flows in Switzerland, spatial origin-destination flow models serve as an easier alternative to the classical 4-step approach in transportation demand modelling. They account for effects in neighbouring municipalities that may influence a particular flow at origin or destination and predict flows as accurately as complex 4-step models.
Paper presented at the 98th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB 2019), Washington, DC, January 13-17.
Modeling Post-Socialist Urbanization: The Case of Budapest (Basel: Birhäuser Verlag, 2019), a new book by Dr Daniel Kiss, lecturer at the Institute for Urban Design, ETH Zurich, examines Budapest’s urban development, planning, and governance between 1990 and 2010. In the face of socialist urbanization’s structural legacies, the recent radical decentralization of government and resources and the impacts of a post-socialist war of ideologies, a trend is analyzed which leads to an urbanization mostly characterized by business-dominated development projects not integrated into any grand urban design.
The author claims this outcome to be typical of the development of post-socialist cities and presents it in an abstract model establishing links between particular historical background conditions and the phenomena of Budapest’s recent urbanization.
With a conversation between Kees Christiaanse, Ákos Moravánszky, and the author.
Book launch, Monday 6 May 2019, 16:00 | ONA, Fokushalle, Neunbrunnenstrasse 50, Zürich.
With Marc Angélil, Cary Siress, and Hans Frei.
Mirroring Effects, written by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, analyses political and economic practices concerning environment-making in the contemporary world. The presented case studies unfold as real-life tales chronicling mutually reinforcing processes that bind urbanization to capitalism. Taken together, the tales narrate the ongoing restructuration of built and lived spaces in diverse regions of the Global North and Global South, charting the course of capital-led development in settings such as Addis Ababa, Mumbai, Cairo, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, and Shanghai. The stories told, if casually overheard, could just as easily be misconstrued as the stuff of incredible fables. But real they are.
Acculturating the Shopping Centre examines whether the shopping centre should be qualified as a global architectural type that effortlessly moves across national and cultural borders in the slipstream of neo-liberal globalization, or should instead be understood as a geographically and temporally bound expression of negotiations between mall developers (representatives of a global logic of capitalist accumulation) on the one hand, and local actors (architects/governments/citizens) on the other. In exploring how the shopping centre adapts to different cultural contexts, this publication highlights the importance of the shopping centre as an urban figure of collectivity that has the capacity to disrupt and even amend the conditions that it encounters.
Biological diversity is known to enhance the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change. It is, however, unclear whether a high diversity of social actors analogously increases the capacity of social-ecological systems to maintain the provision of ecosystem services while undergoing socio-economic and climate changes. Here, using an empirically informed agent-based modelling approach, we demonstrate that both the number of actors (actors richness) and the diversity of the abilities and skills that characterize their management capabilities (actors’ functional diversity) are key determinants of the resilience of social-ecological systems to global change.
The example of the municipality of Lichtensteig in Toggenburg (canton of St. Gallen) illustrates how a high quality of life can be created and maintained even in less densely populated and more structurally disadvantaged space outside of metropolitan areas. Through motivation and the inclusion of the local population, it has been possible in Lichtensteig to enrich the essentially rural baseline situation with urban qualities. The path taken to social prosperity, moving beyond pure market logic, has revealed locally realizable, action- and solution-oriented approaches to balancing out territorial inequities and could also turn into an effective model for other small communities.
The Compass for Inward Development as a Problem-Oriented Methodology for Densification in Small- and Medium-Sized Communes
The revised Swiss Spatial Planning Law, which came into effect in 2014, and the minimum strategy of «inward development before outward development» obligate municipalities to direct their spatial development toward existing, largely built-up spaces, and to coordinate building zone dimensioning across municipal boundaries. For many small- and medium-sized municipalities in Switzerland, this means changing thought patterns with regard to spatial planning practice.
disP – The Planning Review, Volume 55, Issue 1, March 2019 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.
Alltäglich gewordene Wege und Räume nehmen wir kaum mehr bewusst wahr. Dabei entgeht uns, wie sehr unsere Bewegungsmöglichkeiten bestimmten Normen und Gewohnheiten unterworfen sind. Diese Ausgabe des Pamphlet führt die Leser bewusst auf Abwege, um eine neue Perspektive auf die vertraute Umgebung zu gewinnen. Das Zu-Fuss-Gehen bietet sich einerseits als Methode an, um unsere Wahrnehmungs- und Bewegungsmuster aktiv zu hinterfragen. Auf der anderen Seite dient es als Instrument zur kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem gestalteten Raum und als potenzielles Werkzeug für Entwurfs- und Planungsprozesse.
This second volume in the Indicia series focuses on the tools, methods and approaches needed for research on future cities. Following Marshall McLuhan’s famous provocation, we focus less on the ‘message’ and more on the ‘medium’ of research. This involves retreating from research contents—the topics, themes, questions, hypotheses, insights, ideas, concepts and thoughts—for the moment to consider the materials, methods, tools, techniques and approaches that support them.
This is a selection. Head over to our News-Page for more.
2 April 2019, 17:00–18:00 | ETH Zurich, Zentrum, Auditorium Maximum (HG F 30).
Inaugural Lecture of Prof. Dr. Tom Avermaete.
The architecture of the city has always been based on a set of common codes and conventions. Explicated in texts, drawings and models or tacitly defined as compositional principles, typological choices or construction modes, these codes and conventions represent a specific conception of the city and urbanity. During the twentieth century we have been inculcated with the idea that urban norms and forms are articulated by either the state or the market, and are thus either exclusively public or private. As a result, our understanding of urban codes and conventions as ‘common matter’ has vanished.
No registration necessary.
3 April 2019, 09:30–15:30 | ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HIL E4.
The architecture of the city has always been based on a set of common codes and conventions. Explicated in texts, drawings and models or tacitly defined as compositional principles, typological choices or construction modes, these codes and conventions represent a specific conception of the city and urbanity. During the twentieth century we have been inculcated with the idea that urban norms and forms are articulated by either the state or the market, and are thus either exclusively public or private. As a result, our understanding of urban codes and conventions as ‘common matter’ has vanished.
Ausstellung 4. April – 25. August 2019 | Mittwoch bis Sonntag 14:00 – 18:00 Uhr.
Was ist Zürich? Die Ausstellung Nach Zürich beleuchtet Meilensteine der Stadtentwicklung: die Anlage der Parks am See unter der Leitung von Arnold Bürkli, der genossenschaftliche Wohnungsbau des Roten Zürich, die Modernisierung der Nachkriegszeit mit ihren Metropolenträumen und teilweise gescheiterten Verkehrsprojekten, der Bau der S-Bahn und die grossflächige Urbanisierung zum heutigen Metropolitanraum, und schliesslich die Gentrifizierung und innere Verdichtung der letzten zwei Jahrzehnte.
Freitag, 5. April 2019, 9–17 Uhr, im Auditorium Maximum der ETH Zürich, Rämistrasse 101.
Dieser Anlass findet statt zusammen mit dem «Shareland Doctoral Colloquium» (6. April 2019).
Um Arbeit, Freizeit und Wohnen möglichst nahe zu verbinden, zieht es immer mehr Menschen in Städte und ihre Agglomerationen. Vielerorts wird in die Fläche expandiert, die Schweiz hingegen möchte das prognostizierte Arbeitsplatz- und Bevölkerungswachstum vor allem durch die Transformation bereits bebauter Flächen absorbieren. Eine schwierige Aufgabe, zumal das 1980 vom Souverän angenommene Raumplanungsgesetz heute noch ein Vollzugsdefizit aufweist. Sichtbare Folgen sind Wohnungsnot an zentralen Lagen und wachsender Leerwohnungsbestand in der Peripherie. Hinzu kommt, dass die Mobilität an ihre Grenzen stösst. Um lebenswert zu bleiben, müssen Stadträume gerechter wachsen.
5th and 6th April 2019, a linked two-day event with the ETH Forum Wohnungsbau.
Featuring an interdisciplinary panel of 24 PhD’s and Post-Docs engaging with the topics ‘Sharing’, ‘Co-Creating’, and ‘Dwelling’, the Shareland Doctoral Conference will debate new frameworks for understanding cities, housing, and land distribution today.
Sign up for the colloquium on 6 April 2019 at ONA ETH Zürich to attend the sessions, alongside expert critics including Claudio Acioly, Kay Axhausen, Jacqueline Badran, Sascha Delz, Jennifer Duyne Barenstein, Christophe Girot, Marie Glaser, Tanja Herdt, Hubert Klumpner, Matt Nohn, Saskia Sassen, Daniela Thurnherr, Milica Topalovic, Weijen Wang, and Christian Werthmann.
11. April and 16. May 2019. SCCER Mobility Young Talent Development Program.
Seminar series as a platform for young scientists to present their research projects related to Mobility. Further events from the SCCER are also forthcoming, including a Start-up and Entrepreneurship Workshop. Flyer
24 November 2018 – 5 May 2019 | SAM Basel. Ausstellung | Exhibition.
Formen des urbanen Zusammenlebens in der Schweiz.
Der Begriff der Dichte ist in der Schweiz auffällig negativ besetzt. In der politischen Diskussion um die städtebauliche und raumplanerische Entwicklung der Schweiz wird Dichte oft als Kampfbegriff eingesetzt und beschwört Schreckensbilder von «zugebauten» Städten und Horrorszenarien von Hochhäusern, die gewachsene Stadtkerne «überwuchern». Dieses negative Bild gilt es zu korrigieren.
You missed this NSL colloquium on 14 May? The film recording is now online! Logistics and mobility of goods is facing relevant substantial challenges, which are mostly invisible to users, differently from the challenges of personal mobility, such as delays, traffic jams, etc, which we witness daily. This event is to make a comprehensive analysis of the current challenges and solutions for logistics in delivery and urban contexts.
17 May 2019, 09:00–12:00 | ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HIT E 51 (Siemens-Auditorium).
Convened by Tom Avermaete and Cathelijne Nuijsink.
Our histories of urban design and architecture remain sur prisingly eurocentric, while important developments occur in other geographies. This colloquium explores the possibili ties of a more global perspective on architecture and the city. Prominent scholars from other disciplines share approaches that can inspire new global histories of architecture and urban design.
The colloquium is open to the public. An additional methodological workshop in the afternoon requires registration.
12. November 2019 | ETH Zürich, Zentrum, Auditorium Maximum (HG F 30).
Eine der grössten Herausforderungen des ländlichen Raumes sind bauliche Entwicklungen: Infrastrukturprojekte, Umnutzungen von landwirtschaftlichen Gebäuden oder Schutz vor Naturgefahren gelten oft als eine Voraussetzung für seine regionalökonomische Entwicklung und stellen zugleich Eingriffe in Natur und Landschaft dar. Das IRL, geosuisse und das Bundesamt für Landwirtschaft laden dazu ein, dieses Thema gemeinsam zu diskutieren.
Neue Dauerausstellung im Landesmuseum Zürich
Im Auftrag der Kuratoren hat die Spin-off-Firma Scanvision der Professur Christophe Girot in der Ausstellung grossformatige audio-visuelle Installationen realisiert. Scanvision konzipierte dafür vier Flüge durch Punktwolken-Modelle von Zürich – entlang der Töss und ihren einstigen Fabriken, durch die Zürcher Altstadt, in die ungeahnten Tiefen des Hauptbahnhofs sowie zum Seegrund und zur Wasserversorgung.
Sascha Delz, Institut für Städtebau (ISB)
Isabelle Fehlmann, Institut für Landschaftsarchitektur (ILA)
Melanie Fessel, Institut für Städtebau (ISB)
Claudia Gebert, Koordinationsstelle NSL, Chefredaktion
Joe Molloy, Institut für Verkehrsplanung und Transportsysteme (IVT)
Bettina Weibel, Institut für Raum- und Landschaftsentwicklung (IRL)