The research cluster »Real-Time City« supports design students in the international master’s program »MA Integrated Design Research« with the thematic cluster »Urban Intensities & Resources«. It is primarily aimed at ambitious students who wish to work in the field of design and urban research during their Master’s studies with a view to a professional career or a subsequent doctorate.
The research cluster »Real-Time City«acts as a link between master students and relevant research topics at the interface of design, urbanity, culture, politics, media and ecology. The research center enables students to be involved in research and research-based learning projects from the very beginning.
Cities increasingly agglomerate power, capital and knowledge, while a growing movement of people, data, goods and finance emanates from them. In view of these developments, many cities can no longer meet the challenges of supply, social inclusion, economic integration and infrastructure. At the same time, bodies, things, environments and technology are rapidly becoming more closely interrelated. These entanglements offer new potentials – cultural, social, economic, ecological – for alternative urban futures. The main focus of the thematic cluster »Urban Intensities & Resources« is to explore these new possibilities.
By means of spatial and urban analysis, development concepts, design scenarios, speculative interventions and experimental prototypes, the master’s students of the thematic cluster »Urban Intensities & Resources«are looking for answers to how we want to live in the future and how urban spaces, infrastructures and institutions could be designed. Can the city be understood as a physical and virtual resource accessible for all citizens? How do people negotiate relationships with their urban environment? What are the complex and heterogeneous reference systems for their activities? Which social, political and technological developments and consequences arise from the compression and acceleration of urban space-time structures? And how can design take part in these developments?
The range of possible perspectives encompasses:
- individual spatial perceptions and collective imaginations of the urban sphere
- data-driven modes of interaction with urban environments as well as new interfaces between bodies, things and spaces
- structures of exclusion and disciplining and their overcoming
- alternate political spaces and ways to participate in urban life and society
- digital technologies for citizens participating in designing urban structures and processes
- new forms and technologies of mobility
- urban practices of sharing and sustainable consumption
- social utopias for living and working in the post-fossil city
- potentials and »real experiments« of informal urban production
NEW: As part of the thematic cluster »Urban Intensities & Resources«, there is the unique opportunity to select the interdepartmental concentration »Spatial Strategies,« in which design and architecture students work together on projects and seminars.
Image: Dakar Mobilities, 2023, photo by Simon Meienberg.