Living Cities

The twenty-first century has been labeled as the ‘urban century’ and sustainable urban development as one of the key assignments in decades to come. For this reason, architecture and the city are increasingly becoming central to leading academic studies from the fields of social sciences, economy, technology, ecology and governance. However, studies are often conducted from the perspective of a single discipline.

The Living Cities program specifically focuses on how these aspects work together and materialize in the spatial development of the city and its architecture, interpreted as an evolutionary and integrated process of construction and urbanization driven by socio-historical processes. The program brings together research from the chairs of Architectural History and Theory (AHT), Architectural Design and Engineering (ADE), Rational Architecture (RA) and Urbanism and Urban Architecture (UUA).

In line with the Departments’ strategic research agenda on Sustainable Transformation, the program focuses on exploring and understanding the response of architecture and the development of the city for reuse, adaptation and new interventions in response to these shifting societal challenges. Aspects of history and theory, geography, technological systems, urban form and architectural typologies influence each other reciprocally and dynamically in such a cultural ecosystem.