Department of the Built Environment

Urbanism and Urban Architecture

Buildings, cities and regions matter to people’s lives. Well-planned cities help communities prosper and flourish, and therefore city planners can make a difference. Planning for better cities requires new forms of collaboration, organizational structures and new urban futures. In rethinking challenges facing the urbanizing world today, UUA realizes interaction between architecture, cultural heritage planning and urban planning and design.

Focusing on (trans)formation of the city and its architecture anticipating on the systemic changes in urban society, economy, technology and governance

Adaptation of the existing urban environment to changing social and economic constraints, making use of innovative technologies is a key focus area. The group carries out research into urban form as the manifestation of evolutionary processes of development and change. These processes are driven by social, economic and technological innovation, particularly within the changing institutional frameworks of governance. UUA aims to understand the multi-scalar nature of urban form in which building typologies, block- and neighbourhood morphologies as well as urban and regional configurations determine each other reciprocally in a co-evolutionary process. The city and its architecture are studied by combining theories and methodologies from the fields of morphogenesis, urban studies as well as innovation and transition studies.

The research of the chair of UUA is organised in both a PhD program on fundamental research as well as the Urban Lab platform for applied research on real world urban agenda’s with real world actors in a real world setting. Both are intrinsically connected by a similar research approach and focussed on a common research agenda.

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