This urban game aims to facilitate decision-making and design processes to understand complex, real-life urban transformations.

It explores the quantitative aspects of a sustainable approach to urban development through various disciplinary lenses. Through an iterative process that builds upon an existing role-playing game, students refine successive aspects of the game to enrich its potential as an urban analysis and scenario-generating tool.

The main challenges encountered include: identification of relevant parameters constituting the urban environment, simplification of real case studies, understanding the dynamics and game components, creation of an urban quality index that incorporates principles of social design and extending this index as a means of comparing global cities.

Throughout the development of the game, students learn how to define common visions and justify urban planning decisions in a trans-disciplinary framework. Approaching both systematic and creative approaches, the role of future urban designers and planners is strengthened, as moderators of an integrated city development.

The ‘Urban Stories’ lecture series introduces a city during each lecture. The city’s urban development is described through contemporary phenomena and is critically presented as strategies and tactics. The urban phenomenon we explore in this course show urban conditions, models and operational modes.

How can we read cities and recognize current trends and urban phenomena?

The lectures series will produce a catalog of operational urban tools as a series of critical case studies, and as a basis for future practice. Urban Stories introduces a repertoire of urban design instruments to the students.

This will empower them to read cities and apply these tools in the urban environment. The course will approach the topic employing analytical cases on different scales, geographies, in diverse socio-political and economical environments. With our collection of tools compiled in a ‘toolbox’, we aim to tell the fundamental story of contemporary urban development. This specific analysis offers insight and knowledge that helps students to make informed design decisions. The tools are grouped in thematic clusters, compared and interpreted. This approach sensibilities the students to understand how to operate in different local but also international contexts.

Urban form cannot be reduced to the physical space. Cities are the result of social construction, under the influence of technologies, ecology, culture, the impact of experts and accidents. Urban un-concluded processes respond to political interests, economic pressure, cultural inclinations, along with the imagination of architects and urbanists and the informal powers at work in complex adaptive systems. Current urban phenomena are the result of an urban evolution. The facts stored in urban environments include contributions from its entire lifecycle. That is true for the physical environment, but also for non-physical aspects, the imaginary city that exists along with its potentials and problems and with the conflicts that have evolved over time. Knowledge and understanding along with a critical observation of the actions and policies are necessary to understand the diversity and instability present in the contemporary city and to understand how urban form evolved to its current state.

How did cities develop into the cities we live in now? Which urban plans, instruments, visions, political decisions, economic reasonings, cultural inputs, and social organization have been used to operate in urban settlements in specific moments of change? We have chosen cities that are exemplary in illustrating how these instruments have been implemented and how they have shaped urban environments. We transcribe these instruments into urban operational tools that we have recognized and collected within existing tested cases in contemporary cities across the globe.

This lecture series will introduce urban knowledge and the way it has introduced urban models and operational modes within different concrete realities, therefore shaping cities. Urban knowledge will be translated into operational tools, extracted from cities where they have been tested and become exemplary samples, most relevant for providing the understanding of how urban landscape has taken shape. The tools are clustered in twelve thematic clusters and three tool scales for better comparability and cross-reflection.

Tool case studies are compiled into a toolbox, which we use as templates to read the city and to critically reflect upon it. The presented contents are meant to serve as inspiration for positioning in future professional life as well as to provide instruments for future design decisions.

How can architects and urban designers (YOU) realize projects that build better cities?

Urban Design I/II + III/IV: Urban Stories HS18 FS19

Teaching

Composed of films that push the boundaries of form and content, this series will explore emerging practices in documentary cinema. Nine feature-length documentaries and a night of short films across ten weeks focusing on hybrid and unconventional storytelling. An opportunity for cinephiles and those whose interests are piqued to engage with internationally acclaimed documentaries and filmmakers operating at the intersection of art, sociology, anthropology, and urbanism.

This course is connected to the Spring ’18 elective course ‘ACTION! On the Real City – Record, Edit: Langstrasse’

Feb 22 | Dark Days (2000 1hr 34mn) by Marc Singer

March 01 | People’s Park (2012, 1hr 18mn) by Libby D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki

March 08 | Vivan Las Antípodas (2012, 1hr 48mn) by Viktor Kossakovsky

March 15 | Flotel Europa (2015, 1hr 11mn) by Vladimir Tomic | followed by Q&A w/director

April 11 | Behemoth (2015, 1h 35mn) by Zhao Liang

April 18 | Yumen (2013, 1hr 05mn) by J.P. Sniadecki

April 25 | The Human Crater (2017, 60mn) by U5 | followed by Q&A w/directors

May 02 | The Human Surge (2016, 1h40mn) by Eduardo Williams

May 17 | Shorts Night: Various + Student Shorts | followed by drinks reception

Experimental Documentary Film Series

The City Through The Lens

The elective course “INFORMAL ZÜRICH: Ethnographic Filmmaking on the City’s Edges“ develops new forms of urban literacy in learning from the complex, real-life city. The course aims to use diverse qualitative research methods and practical recording tools to approach the context of urban informality in Zürich through a multi-disciplinary lens that includes urbanism, social research and media use.

Through a combination of practical exercises in filming and editing with a theoretical crash-course in ethnographic methods, this course aims to equip students with the basic tools and core principles to create short but complex portraits of urban space.

Central to the course will be numerous filed trips examples of informal spaces in Zürich, from occupied spaces to areas of ephemeral sociability and more. These trips will be key in developing the skills and generating the material of the course’s outputs. Using widely available recording tools and editing software, students will turn their “thick” readings of the social and spatial realities of these case studies to develop short videos of about 3-5 minutes. These outputs will collectively give a glimpse of the past, present and future of informality both in Zürich, as well as in cities like it.

Year	2015 - 2018
Leads	Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner
Project Manager	Michael Walczak
Research	Marie Grob, Haris Piplas
Students	Stefan Breit, Andrea Gonzalez Palos, Sophie Claude Herzog, Donia Maryam Jornod, Viktoriya Maleva, Isidro Martinez Sanchez, Mihai Radulescu, Nathanael Weiss, Arnaud Andrier, Wai Look Cheng, Oliver Faber, Samuel Galmiche, Samuel Leder, Theodora Papamichaeil, Gaël Zuber, D.V. Naga Lalitha Chandrabhanu, Nilosha Dave, Romain Masson
Partner	Innovedum Fund ETH
Status	Ongoing

Urban Game: Action! On The Real City