Urban Stories Lecture Course: Urban Design III/IV (HS 2023 / FS 2024)
Creators: name: Klumpner, Hubert
name: Salva Rocha Franco, Fernando Tulio
Publisher: name: ETH Zurich
Year: 2024
Subjects: Urban design
Architectural theory

description: The majority of the urban dewllers will belong to the urban poor, people who are dwellers of underprivileged, impoverished slum areas of cities in the Global South. These processes illustrate a need for urban designers to rethink the fact that our profession mostly ignored how the majority of human beings live. For decades, the focus has rested comfortably on the global north; designers’ books, magazines, and projects have mostly gazed above the socio-economic equator. Not only has this limited our fields’ creative palette, but it has depleted its legitimacy. If designers and architects are to improve cities and impart meaningful strategies to subsequent generations, we must begin to look southwards with creative curiosity. The slums of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and the recently impoverished suburbs of North American and European cities cast doubt on the traditional notion of city growth as selfcontained and rational, born of the logic of the functional organization of space. Fast-growing cities in the developing world and shrinking cities in the developed world present us with two faces of the same coin, joined by the phenomena of informal development. We have come to an understanding that the conditions and the wealth of cities in the western world are the exceptions. The rule, however, is, what we have documented over the last decade in the cities of the South: Urban development without institutional assistance; congested infrastructure; lack of resources; and exclusion through policy. Cities, whether deliberately or not, are moving toward a less formal, more flexible order. It is therefore critical that designers recognize that informality provides a large-scale, conceptual framework of cooperation between stakeholders (NGOs, policymakers, and industry partners) and architecture and urban design professionals. Such collaboration would establish a global agenda of an opendesign framework that accepts cultural, social, and ideological differences. Thus, we must shift the emphasis of contemporary architectural practice and education from a form-oriented to a process-driven concern. The authorities often imply outdated and unadapted urban policy frameworks. The results of such policies are too frequently catastrophic. As underprivileged communities are often constructed in the least desirable areas for development—such as land with extreme slopes and weak soil resistance or areas subject to seasonal flooding or earthquakes—they are at permanent risk. Understanding these different processes is critically important, especially for architects who intend to work in the “developing world.” On the other hand, cultural gaps and differences largely remain in place and impede a productive flow of information, skills, and development within the knowledge transfer processes between the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ world. At the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, young architects are being trained to respond to the named challenges and foster the export and import of ideas across the hemispheres. A re-orientation within the architectural profession is necessary for it to incorporate the developing world into our understanding and definition of urban studies. This exchange of ideas must be a two-way bridge between the developed and the developing world. Successful change comes from a collaboration between international expertise and local knowledge. It is essential to have input from the best consultants and to remain connected to the most advanced solutions and technologies. In many ways, this re-orientation can certainly happen within architecture and urban design education. These developments raise our expectations for a more equitable global exchange of architectural and urbanistic ideas. In the future, we anticipate that even more universities will show presence in the developing world. Our experiences have taught us that architects must become advocates for the people and active agents of change. But that change must come accomplished thoughtfully and carefully, one step at a time, to be viable and durable. We strive to bring citizens in their cities closer together, to create a greater sense of individual responsibility for a stronger community and an active civil society. One over-arching question tests all the investigations we make and solutions we propose: are people better off than they were before we arrived? Rather than imposing change, our Chair engages the real world and attempts to provide a set of tools, a toolbox for students to give them both better understanding of theory and derive operational and practical knowledge. Future generations will judge our success by the applicability of our solutions and their capacity to improve living conditions for everyone, everywhere. Our agenda in devising and applying the toolbox in our Lecture Course is two-fold: to shift the emphasis of contemporary architecture and architectural education from form-driven to purpose-oriented; and to eliminate the gap between design and its social impact.