What is the urban and architectural strategy for an emerging Bogotá?

Bogotá’s inner city was long characterized by chaotic urban development, which led to great inequality and informality. Today, Colombia’s capital is globally recognized for its urban innovation and social justice, an urban transformation put in place by a series of three consecutive mayors who vastly changed the face of the city. This emergent urbanism, produced at the intersection of top-down planning and bottom-up improvisation, cannot be meaningfully addressed by traditional planning models and demands critical investigations into the future vision of inner city Bogotá.

Students will travel to Bogotá as an extension of the Urban-Think Tank Design Studio to investigate the architecture, urbanism, culture, and social exchange in Bogotá with a specific focus on public spaces and park systems. City and architectural tours, museum visits, lectures and talks from local experts will constitute the majority of the trip. With representatives from the City of Bogotá and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, we will take part in a series of on-site mapping workshops to collect urban ideas and input from residents, interdisciplinary experts, community groups, NGOs, and the private sector.

The studio will explore new building typologies for reclaiming the public spaces and urban landscapes in the area of Plaza de Los Mártires along a newly planned metro line in the city of Bogotá.

Students will design an alternative architectural project by creating urban prototypes for the Colombian capital of Bogotá. Replicable typologies, integrated infrastructure, and innovative urban scenarios will be generated that challenge conventional approaches to urban development, mobility, and open space. Bogotá is an emerging city that faces many of the same problems that come with the pressures of the global urbanization process in the 21st century. A post-conflict city in transition, one that is seeking a new identity in the midst of a peace process, is apt for a reformulation of its fragmented urban fabric in the central city. In this context, the design studio is seeking advanced opportunities to create an inclusive urban vision for the next metropolis.

The public space in the city of Bogotá was lost decades ago to social and political turmoil, and it is now, that this space will have to be reconquered. The focus area will be in the historic center, and its network of streets, squares, parks, and their adjacent built environment around Plaza de Los Mártires and Avenida Caracas. Along this main artery of the city, the new “Metro de Bogotá” is currently in the planning process, an elevated metro system that will drastically be changing the urban fabric and value of real-estate in the area. This urban revolution is creating the immense opportunity to develop an experimental city vocabulary in the three-dimensional cityscape thinking through various scales and hybrid programming.

Supported by the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Prof. Christophe Girot, the studio will collaborate with representatives from the City of Bogotá’s Planning Department, associated local and international partners and experts from the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá.

Students will undertake research by studying existing international test cases, formulating their design hypothesis, planning urban scenarios, modeling their designs through various formats, and communicating their intentions in a series of critiques and reviews. Students will be encouraged to develop an individual and critical position on the potential role of the architect to guide a design process within broader social, political and economic systems.

A series of lectures, screenings, readings, and discussions will accompany the design program. These will be given by selected experts from the fields of architecture, urbanism, landscape, building technologies and associated disciplines, as well as experts from the Urban-Think Tank Chair. Workshops and in-studio tutorials will be provided to train students in effective methods of representing complex ideas through visual media.

New Typologies to Reclaim Public Space

Urban Prototype

Teaching

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? Which cities are exemplary in illustrating how these instruments have been implemented and how they have shaped urban environments? Can these instruments be transcribed into urban operational tools that we recognize within existing tested cases in contemporary cities across the globe?

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 unconcluded processes respond to political interests, economic pressure, cultural inclinations, along with the imagination of architects and planers 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 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.

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.

Case studies will be identified to compile documents and an archive, that 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 valuable contributions and interventions.

For wider information on the previous research teaching activities, please visit:
utt-toolbox.com

Students, who are officially subscribed to the lecture course in this semester, can find all course material, weekly quiz questions, exercises, additional readings at the E-learning Moodle platform.

Urban Design I/II

Urban Stories

Johannesburg’s inner city today is densely populated and diverse—characterized by pockets of inclusion and exclusion, but shaped by transient migrant and immigrant communities attempting to claim a stake in sub-Saharan Africa’s rapidly growing economic hub. Development of the area has often been subject to contradictory approaches evident in the coexistence of highly secured, neatly manicured banking and office compounds, and the cluttered sidewalk exchanges of the vibrant—and often illicit—informal economy. This emergent urbanism, produced at the intersection of top-down planning and bottom-up improvisation, cannot be meaningfully addressed by traditional planning models and demands critical investigations into the future vision of inner city Johannesburg.

Students will travel to Johannesburg as an extension of the Urban-Think Tank Design Studio to investigate the architecture, urbanism, culture, and social exchange in Johannesburg with a specific focus on housing. City and architectural tours, museum visits, lectures and talks from local experts will constitute the majority of the trip. With students from the University of Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture, we will take part in a series of on-site mapping workshops to collect urban ideas and input from residents, interdisciplinary experts, community groups, NGOs, and the private sector.

Notes
Enrollment in this seminar week is NOT required but is highly recommended for students in the Radical Jozi Design Studio.  The trip is open to max 15 students, but space is unlimited for students enrolled in the design studio. If enrollment is full online, please contact Danny Wills (wills@arch.ethz.ch) to sign up.


Visa
Each passenger traveling across any international boundary is solely responsible for obtaining all necessary travel documents, including any required visas, a valid passport and for complying with the laws of each country flown from (the departure country), through (any transit country) and into (the destination country). Neither the ETH Zurich nor the travel services provider nor the booking office can be charged for inconvenience and costs as a result of failure to obtain a visa.

Location	Bogotá, Colombia
Urban-Think Tank Chair of Architecture and Urban Design	Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg, Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Diego Ceresuela Weismann, Melanie Fessel
Research Partners	Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Secretaría Distrital de Planeación (City of Bogotá), Embassy of Switzerland in Bogotá, State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)
Office visits	Rogelio Salmona Architecture Works, Konrad Brunner Arquitectos, Daniel Bermúdez, Holcim Award Jury, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Alejandro Restrepo Arquitectura, Reception at the Swiss Embassy in Bogotá.

Urban Laboratory

New Typologies to Reclaim Public Space