Digital Urban Platforms & Services

The teaching module aims at understanding the concept of digital urban data platforms as collaborative management tools of data-driven urban services and gives insights into key stakeholders involved, IT architecture standards used and management structures needed for a successful application.

Smart Urbanism & Digital Strategies

The Case Study project explores exemplary urban challenges to apply all knowledge acquired throughout the master course “Smart City Solutions”. Students are developing “smart urbanism” skills by designing guiding development principles, a collaborative vision, key performance indicators, participation tools and integrated urban solutions to outline an implementation strategy and action plan to steer urban transformation processes.

Citizen City Science: Mach Moabit.....!

The interactive exhibition presents concepts for analogue and digital citizen participation designed in collaboration with communication design students of FH Potsdam and architecture students of TU Berlin. Citizens were invited to debate about “smart districts” in the context of socially deprived areas.

Adaptive Skin Berlin

The design studio explored the “second skin of the earth”, the city, through the eyes of textile and product designers and architects, using “clothing” to rethink urban fabric to produce “urban space suits” as experiential learning tools. Alexanderplatz Berlin served as the study field for an integrated masterplan design and product design development.

R_Objects

Hard and soft infrastructure is required for the exchange of resources to support urban life. As the infrastructure systems are mostly unconsciously used or covered up by layers of the urban fabric, there is very little awareness about the availability of resources such as water, electricity and space. The workshop explored these questions through the design of urban games.

African Climate & Development Initiative

The field study aimed at exploring grassroots initiatives in Cape Town driving sustainable education, waste management, climate-friendly mobility and organic urban food production. The data collected gives insights into the motivation, resources and barriers of the so called “Urban Change Agents” and highlights their impact - reminding municipalities, urban planners, economists and climate researchers of their existence and potential role for climate and urban development plans.

Dissertation: Urban Change Agents

The dissertation sheds light on the transformative power of civil initiatives who perform within transformative action fields (e.g. reuse and recycle, low-carbon mobility, urban agriculture, education). Cape Town serves as a case study and describes the transition arena of civil actors defined as “Urban Change Agents” and reveals the barriers preventing the projects from scaling. The “Creative Climate City” is proposed as a vision.

Smart Sustainable District Moabit West

The project report summarises the activities undertaken as part of the applied EU research project in Moabit West, an inner city district of Berlin with a highly ambitious climate action strategy at district level. The process design and methodologies to design and co-create integrated infrastructure solutions are explained and the role of multiple stakeholders, the utilities companies and the district authority Berlin Mitte is described.