Special Issue
Better Accessibility for Urbanes Land

Decentralised territories are underrepresented in urban discourses, although they often include ‘hidden stars’ of regional socio-economic development, high levels of innovation and a full integration in the global economy. However, their fundamental challenge there is to achieve better accessibility. To enable it, the movement function of transport needs to be brought together with the location of opportunities, as our author states.

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“How can we build elastically?”

How do we want to live? This is the question posed by IBA’27, the International Building Exhibition to be held in Stuttgart and the surrounding region – in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Until 2027, this exhibition will look for answers to how cities, villages and settlements in the highly industrialized metropolitan region of Stuttgart can meet social, technological and ecological change. We talked to the artistic director of IBA’27, Andreas Hofer, about cultural images, accelerators of transformation, the legacy of modernity and why places on the edge, places of transition, of being in-between are precisely spaces of the future.

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Diversity as an Opportunity

When it comes to cosmopolitan urbanity all eyes are on the metropolises, the large cities. There are only a few examples that teach us anything about how small communities deal with issues of migration and integration. In order to understand the differences between a metropolis and smaller towns that have little diversity the authors interviewed mayors and administrations in eight small towns in the German federal state of Brandenburg.

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Senses as Scale: Accessing “le territoire”

“It is neither balcony cultivation nor green roofs that will save the planet, but rather courage and multi-centrality between villages” – Anna Chavepayre

The French-Swedish architect Anna Chavepayre on the value of rural identity in architecture and planning and how linking villages can create sustainability. Interview by Anna-Maria Pershagen

 

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Peripheries – Dynamics for the Green Deal

A call for a territorial dimension of the Green Deal for cities, towns, villages, and regions: Place-oriented strategies towards Reserves of Resilience are discussed as important contribution to overall transformation to sustainability. The need to foster Territorial Creativity for a new Habitat Vision is put forward to innovate concepts and tools of urbanism and to strengthen action-oriented research.

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Steel cities in transit landscapes

The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe: The architects Kateřina Frejlachová and Tadeáš Říha reflect over the spatial impact of global supply chains on peripheral territories.

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Branding as a lever for resilient transformation

Finding perspectives for marginal areas is a highly relevant contemporary issue in Italy. The B4R work in the Sicani Mountains in Sicily offers a framework for the region’s development and manages to describe a path to activate “reserves of resilience” for new sustainable lifestyles.

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#googleurbanism or: Remote Research

Christof Mayer, raumlabor and Ute Meyer, urbanes.land, discuss in-between territories and experimental ways to decipher and picture their character from a physical distance.

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An adventure that is both monotonous and exhilarating

The French photographer Eric Tabuchi and artist Nelli Monnier dedicated ten years of their life to documenting and describing what they define as territories of France. Since 2017 they travelled across the countryside to explore singularities and commonalities of contemporary landscapes. An interview with Eric Tabuchi.

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“We seek to overcome the undercomplex urban-rural dichotomy”

The relationship between urban and rural spaces is changing at a very dynamic pace. studio amore, Berlin-based urban designers, focus on the issue of transformation in rural areas. They have a vision of the countryside that differs from others. It’s the studio’s view that transformation research needs to look at the rural development changes from a different angle.

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The socio-spatial qualities of the landscape

The perspective of the city constitutively presupposes peripheries – whereas from the perspective of the land, which today we usually perceive as landscape, peripheries do not exist. Cities are referred to via attributes such as the public sphere, specific characteristics, intrinsic logic … The land has lost all these aspects and an exclusively aesthetic perspective on landscape cannot replace them.

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The urban future lies in the countryside

Imagine the future is not in the city, but instead in rural areas, where radical changes are taking place. Imagine the countryside could be more futuristic than any big or smart city. This is what Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect and urbanist, states in the current exhibition for the Guggenheim Museum.

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A series of opportunities

Video interview: Christoph Hupfer – Professor for Mobility Planning at Hochschule Karlsruhe and Ute Meyer – urbanes.land –  about the obstacles of transforming mobility patterns in urbanized territories and how integrating processes of land-use and transport planning can benefit the greater agenda of emission-reduced and social-equitable settlements. 

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Experiments as fertile ground for innovation

Podcast: The German-American Urbanist Mark Kammerbauer and Suzanne Potjer – the Project Leader of the Urban Futures Studio project “Experimenting with Cities” at the University of Utrecht on the experiment and its governance.

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Unlocking potentials in urbanised territories

Martin Spalek and Ute Meyer, urbanes.land, on urbanised territories as a structural opportunity for sustainability and reserve of levers for their transformation.

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Connecting knowledge for comprehensive transition

Since the UN has announced the majority of mankind to be living in urban areas we have allowed a single vision to become the dominant answer to future challenges: the idea of the resilient urban body. This reduction misses a large potential of urbanized territories…

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A photographic report from urbanised territories

No more sense in terms like urban and rural – all land man made. Productive landscapes – urban resorts. Infrastructure blurring any idea of centre and periphery. Housing crouching to motorways, people in constant departure and arrival…

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Good Growth in the Cambridge-Oxford Arc

Tom Holbrook, director of 5th Studio Architecture and Urbanism, London, on future planning options for UKs Fast Growth Cities and the challenges to the proposition of sustainable development.

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