Sustainable Urban Engineering of Territory

This quarter focusses on the “making” or “remaking” of the city. How to renew existing urban areas by densification and at the same time improvement of public space to accommodate a changing climate, energy transition, and need for biodiversity and healthy life of citizens? This course offers the analysis and synthesis phase for the project in the R&D Studio and focusses specially on the city as a construct form: the natural and man-made conditions of the urban landscape in order to integrate all interest in an urban plan. This understanding of the hardware the urban landscape is necessary to get control over the performance of the city by means of urban design.

The main point of SUET is to give you the broad spectrum of the elements which form the assemblage construct form of the city and teach you methods to translate the data describing these elements into information necessary to find synergy as a first step into urban design that determines the performance of this construct in relation to urban climate, accommodating biodiversity or new energy systems.

Thus, an important aim is to create awareness and overview of the range of technical topics that in urban planning and design you need to deal with in co-creation. Working in the existing cities demands even more interdisciplinary design processes, that is why you will form groups of  4 students that will function as a small ‘engineering’ office and each member is dedicated to one of the four categories: civil constructions, water, energy or soil/ecology. T0 make use of the larger group the analysis and exploration of these categories will be done with the dedicated teachers on these topics. The goal is to produce a technical profile and a technical projection of the study area as group to support each individual studio project.