Exploring Spaces through the Eyes of Urban Design

Mara Siegel
Designer, Cologne

One of the main issues for urban design is how designers can provide contemporary solutions for continuous transformations in urban space. At present, this is mainly due to the fact that more and more people move from villages to cities because they hope for a better life, or because they escape from deplorable conditions in their home towns. These human influxes change the places where they flow into and from where they originate. A third of the world’s population moves – across provinces, countries, continents – from the countryside to the cities. Here, urban designers have the opportunity to contribute to problem solutions through alternative representations of the city. How, that’s what this talk is about. After a short discourse, which deals with the concept of urbanity itself, the empirical research work “Parallel World” by Mara Siegel, which was produced as part of the KISD-BA program, will then be presented and discussed.

Mara Siegel (*1991). From 2012, she studied at KISD where her work focused on urban spatial phenomenologies. In addition to a thesis on the Disneyfication of everyday life and a comparison of prison architecture and interiors in the USA and Germany, she earned a scholarship to study architecture abroad at Philadelphia University. There, she also finished her bachelor thesis on the urban structures of parallel societies. Mara is currently writing her master thesis at the Design Academy Eindhoven focusing on architectural post-war phenomena in the Balkan region and dealing with topics like trauma and architecture as well as transience and/or formal identity issues of the Eastern bloc states.

The talk will be held in English language.