Integrated project: Urban Planning and Landscape
Winter Semester 2023/24
Duration: 1 semester
Occasion & Goal
Cities are complex entities that are constantly changing. Architects, urban planners and landscape architects participate in these dynamic processes of change in different ways. This will be practised for the first time in this project.
On the basis of a concrete planning task, you will learn to understand connections, find out approaches for change and work out proposals for the development of an urban area. You are supposed to perceive the city at a specific location, analyse it and derive conclusions, translate these into concepts and discuss them as well as visualise your considerations and explain and justify them in a comprehensible way.
The urban project is the joint exercise assignment of the Chair and Institute of Urban Design, the Chair of Planning Theory and Urban Development and the Chair of Landscape Architecture in the urban project. Building on the accompanying lectures, in which initial knowledge about the city, its development, its planning and design is imparted, you will deepen the knowledge you have acquired in a practice-oriented exercise and try out urban planning working methods and techniques.
Location
As part of the integrated project, you are to develop ideas and measures for the redesign of an Aachen commercial area along the A 544 urban freeway and design a sustainable urban structure with high open space qualities.
Task
is to present the spatial and functional relationships for the extended area under consideration and to develop an overall strategy. For the actual planning area, an urban design concept is to be developed on the basis of this concept. The area is located in a well-connected location in the northwest of the city of Aachen on the A544, which represents an important access to Aachen city center at Europaplatz as the city entrance. Following on from the Aachen Master Plan 2030, the preservation and development of the parallel green space and the renaturation of the Wurm play a decisive role in the open space design of the area.
Through the use of different uses and building typologies as well as identity-creating spatial and open space structures, new addresses are to be formed. In this context, a program for mixed urban uses with service, craft and other non-disturbing commercial units, appropriate in type and scope for the location, is to be formulated and spatially structurally mixed with different forms of housing.
The convenient location also provides an opportunity for the development of innovative mobility concepts, as well as the further thinking of existing concept ideas for the connection of the area. For the (private, communal and public) open spaces, differentiated green structures and sustainable utilization offers for access, stay and leisure with special design qualities are to be developed.