SPATIAL STRATEGIES

SPATIAL STRATEGIES is concerned not only with material objects, but also with cultural and social processes and practices of use, appropriation, and transformation of the designed environment. Special attention is paid to the exploration and development of the city as a living space – with its artifacts, its social milieus, diverse cultures, sensory impressions and histories. We will focus on spaces of different sizes and their conditions on a 1:1 scale. Through active design we get to know them and invent new ways to open them up for appropriation processes. We initiate processes that help the actors involved to deal with them and to recognize, understand and use their possibilities.

SPATIAL STRATEGIES examines the spatial rearrangements brought about by upheavals in global political geography, the proliferation of digital communication technologies, and the global circulation of people and goods. The basic thesis is that through these processes of social transformation, people’s relationships to their spaces are being renegotiated, changed, and rearranged. By analyzing such processes of transformation, the program aims to contribute to a better understanding and explanation of current social conflicts and insecurities, and – through architecture and design – to point to alternative designs for public spaces. In the process, bodies, things, spaces and technologies connect in previously unknown ways and open up new potentials for the urban. Exploring these possibilities and rethinking and redesigning the city as an urban commons is an essential component of the program.

SPATIAL STRATEGIES describes a field in which new tasks arise for designers, architects, and cultural scientists, and in which artists, urban and landscape planners, and other professions are also active in design. The framework is formed by a plurality of theoretical and methodological approaches to spatial research from design and architecture, cultural and media theory, sociology, urban studies and geography. The program systematically combines artistic design with scientific methods.

The range of possible perspectives encompasses:

• Subjective perceptions of space and collective imaginaries of the urban
• Data-driven modes of interaction and new interfaces between bodies, things and spaces
• Security, control and power
• Structures of socio-spatial inequality, exclusion and discipline and their overcoming
• Alternative political spaces and modes of participation in the city and society
• Political architecture and democratic spaces
• Analog/digital techniques for participatory appropriation and design of urban spaces and processes
• New forms and technologies of mobility
• Interactions between migration and mobility
• Urban practices of sharing and sustainable consumption
• Social utopias for life in the post-fossil city
• Potentials and real experiments of informal urban production
• Participatory approaches to the appropriation of space
• The emergence of new publics and public spaces
• Social cohesion and diversity

In transdisciplinary projects, students have the opportunity to develop and implement their research and designs together with non-university research institutions as well as cultural, civic and urban partners. In addition, there is the possibility of transcultural work with international partner universities.

SPATIAL STRATEGIES is embedded in an attractive scientific environment, which includes the TH research center »Real-Time City« and the doctoral program NRW with its focus on »Bau und Kultur« (Building and Culture). Master’s graduates in design and architecture have the opportunity to complete a dissertation project in the »Space and Culture« focus area of the NRW Doctoral Academy.