R and D Studio: Designing Urban Environments

The Department of Urbanism has set as its mission to advance, share and apply knowledge on how to adapt the built environment to societal and ecological changes and how design, planning and engineering interventions can respond to evolving conditions and contribute to fairer and healthier urban environments (The Delft Approach to Urbanism, 2021). Against this backdrop, the object of this RenD studio is the design of the urban environment, exploring the potential of the urban design project to act as a catalyst for socio-ecological transitions

Students are encouraged to embrace the understanding of the urban environment as a complex and dynamic system. This implies considering a variety of issues which shape and impact the built environment across multiple scales and temporalities. These include climate adaptation and mitigation, landscape systems, typomorphology, density, programme, access, and ownership, as well as situated knowledge, architectural qualities and sensorial experiences.

If the first quarter focused on analyzing and designing structures, forms and systems at the city scale, the design studio of the second quarter combines the visionary with the ambition to create facts on the ground. While continuing to stress on the importance of trans-scalar relations, the focus is on the scale of the urban project. That is, students are invited to question the agency of urban design in addressing urgent societal and environmental challenges through concrete ideas and grounded spatial projects. 

Overall, this quarter puts the stress on:

1. Engaging with complex socio-ecological challenges in specific urban settings, by critically examining how environmental, social, and spatial processes intersect and shape the built environment

2. Integrating research and design as complementary practices with a focus on collaboration across disciplines, particularly between spatial design and engineering

3. Practicing spatial thinking and communication as core components of the design process, emphasizing parallel processes and iterative feedback loops between analysis, design, and (re)presentation.