Architecture
Understand a city’s people, components, functions, scales and dynamics, as precondition for its sustainable design and management. This self-study course is not actively moderated. You can view the course for free, but questions will not be answered and there is no guarantee that the content will be available or updated.

Course Details

Language English
Duration 11 week
Effort 2 hours/week
Description

Understanding a city as a whole, its people, components, functions, scales and dynamics, is crucial for the appropriate design and management of the urban system. While the development of cities in different parts of the world is moving in diverse directions, all estimations show that cities worldwide will change and grow strongly in the coming years.

Especially in the tropics over the next 3 decades, it is expected that the number of new urban residents will increase by 3 times the population of Europe today. Yet already now, there is an extreme shortage of designers and urban planners able to understand the functioning of a city as a system, and to plan a sustainable and resilient city. To answer questions like: Which methods can contribute to the sustainable performance of a city, and how can we teach this to the next generations, the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore has produced over the last 3 years many necessary research results. “Future Cities” aims to bring these latest results to the places where they are needed most.
The only way to better understand the city is by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different representations, properties and impact factors of the urban system. For that reason, in this course we will explore the city as the most complex human-made “organism” with a metabolism that can be modeled in terms of stocks and flows. We will open a holistic view on existing and new cities, with a focus on Asia. Data-driven approaches for the development of the future city will be studied, based on crowdsourcing and sensing.

At first, we will give an overview of the components and dynamics of the future cities, and we will show the importance of information and information architecture for the cities of the future. The course will cover the origins, state-of-the-art and applications of information architecture and simulation. “Future Cities” will provide the basis to understand, shape, plan, design, build, manage and continually adapt a city. You will learn to see the consequences of citizen science and the merging of Architecture and information space. You will be up-to-date on the latest research and development on how to better understand, create and manage the future cities for a more resilient urban world.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for attending this course.

Course instructors

Bernhard Klein

Dr. Bernhard Klein received his diploma degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich and a doctoral degree at the University of Vienna in Economic and Social Sciences. He joined the Distributed and Multimedia Systems research group a…

Chen Zhong

Chen Zhong is a PhD candidate at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) in Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. She holds a master degree of Engineering in GIS from LIESMARS and a bachelor degree in spatial information and digital technology at Wuhan Uni…

Dirk Hebel

Dirk E. Hebel is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Construction at the Future Cities Laboratory in the Singapore-ETH Centre. Prior to that, he was the founding Scientific Director of the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and…

Estefania Tapias

Estefania Tapias is Postdoctoral fellow and Lecturer at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich. Her research is focus on Information Cities and climate-sensitive urban planning. Estefania attained her doctoral degree at ETH Zurich and obtained …

Marcel Brülisauer

Marcel Bruelisauer is a researcher and PhD candidate at the FCL Low Exergy Module. During and since receiving his MSc in civil engineering from ETH Zurich, he has been active in the field of sustainable construction and building systems on three different…

Gerhard Schmitt

Gerhard Schmitt is Professor of Information Architecture at ETH Zurich, leader of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Simulation Platform, Founding Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore, and ETH Zurich Senior Vice President for ETH Global. His re…

Reinhard König

Dr. Reinhard Koenig studied architecture and urban planning. He completed his PhD thesis in 2009 at the University of Karlsruhe. Dr. Koenig has worked as a research assistant and appointed Interim Professor at Bauhaus-University Weimar. He heads research …

ETH Zurich

Freedom and individual responsibility, entrepreneurial spirit and open-mindedness: ETH Zurich stands on a bedrock of true Swiss values. Our university for science and technology dates back to the year 1855, when the founders of modern-day Switzerland crea…

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