The conference, subtitled Conditions and projections, hopes to propel a discussion about the unfulfilled potential of the practice of Urban Design and the role it can play in mediating the different disciplines and forces that eventually mould the built environment in our cities, suburbs and peri-urban conditions —the larger landscape that comprises the objects of human interventions of various kinds.

Participants in the conference will address 6 specific aspects relevant to contemporary discourse in Urban Design:

• Land/form or the re-consideration of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground, city and landscape, no longer occupying a site but instead, constructing and transforming the site itself.
• Micro-Urbanisms or how in the context of crisis and uncertainty, local, networked, and even intangible interventions can have a direct impact on urban life.
• Applied Research or the instrumental use of teaching and academia’s theories, methods and techniques for the purpose of real transformation of the urban realm.
• Regulatory Practices that actively engage design through planning and policy making to propose more comprehensive scenarios to the current physical transformations of the built environment.
• Strategic Upgrading, or the idea of large-scale transformation precipitated by strategic changes in the urban microcosm.
• Authorship and Collaboration, or the exploration of current thinking about the role of collective authorship and collaboration within the design process in response to diverse working scales, emerging technologies and degrees of complexity

You can learn more about the conference at the official website.

Hi,
I am an architecture student from Germany and would like to share my last semester\’s urban design project with you. It was a group work focusing on the revitalization of a city quarter in the UNESCO-listed Old Town of Damascus, Syria. We proposed up-to-date housing in the traditional courtyard houses and a new cultural center on what has been urban wasteland for centuries.

| check out the project here (urban) and here (housing). |

How do you feel about it? Is a new construction for culture and leisure in this context full of religious history thinkable? How about multi-family housing around a common courtyard in an islamic country?

After all, what is the most sustainable solution for this decaying but beautiful quarter – in all aspects of sustainability? What would have been your approach?

People

• Mustafa Ali, an artist living in the old city of Damascus.
• Meyar Al Roumi, a film producer
• Hekmat Chatta, a Damascene architect, one of the founders of batata group, well concerned about what is happening in the old town of Damascus.
• Ali Kaaf, a Syrian artist living in Berlin.
• Samer Kozah, an artist from old Damascus with a new vision of it.
• Friederike Stolleis, a German ethnologue with her dissertation “Öffentliches Leben in privaten Räumen – Muslimische Frauen in Damaskus“
• Stefan Weber, a specialist for Damascus in so many ways.

Books & Magazines

• Ross Burns with all his publications like “Damascus – a History” and “The Monuments of Syria“
• “Auf der Suche nach dem Orient” the February magazine of DU, a swiss cultural journal

Post autor: Leonie (Germany)

If you want to share your projects with our readers, contact us.