Reactivate Athens

Capital flight, debt, and crisis have left visible scars on the face of the built environment in cities world-wide. In central Athens, endemic vacancy, a deteriorating building stock, and a fragmented urban fabric are all symptoms of longer-term processes of decline. Supported by the Onassis Foundation, Reactivate Athens More

Barranquilla

Developed by a group of researchers of the LUS Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Prof. Hubert Klumpner, and supported by the groups of ITA, Prof. Dr. Arno Schlueter and Prof. Dr. Philippe Block, in collaboration with an international network of partners such as Universidad del Norte, the More

Empower Shack

While South Africa is usually seen as a source of stability and prosperity in its region, approximately 7.5 million people live in informal settlements and the country faces an overall housing shortage of 2.5 million units. Arising from this context, Empower Shack is an interdisciplinary development project directed More

Torre David

Bottom-up strategies are one way to address prevailing urban scarcities. Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer and a national banking crisis that crippled the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Neglected for over a decade, More

Mass Housing in Brazil

The research on Cidade de Deus, a low-income neighborhood located in Rio de Janeiro’s western urban expansion zone, addresses the transformation of a peripheral mass housing settlement from the 1960s into a consolidated urban environment today. The violent story of Cidade de Deus has been widely popularized through More

Massenwohnungsbau in Brasilien

Die Forschungsarbeit zur Entwicklung von Cidade de Deus, einer Siedlung für Massenwohnungsbau aus den 1960er Jahren in Rio de Janeiro, untersucht die Transformation eines damals isolierten Randgebiets in ein heute funktionierendes städtisches Quartier. Die von Gewalt bestimmte Geschichte von Cidade de Deus hat durch das gleichnamige Buch von More

Urban Quality

The game plan was as follows: five colleagues from the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, whose positions could not be further apart, accepted the challenge of the Swiss National Research Programme “New Urban Quality” (NRP 65) to investigate measures for improving the contemporary urban condition. Whereas a More

Urbanism of the New Third Age

This research addresses the intersection of two of the most important socio-demographic transformations occurring in our contemporary world: population ageing and urbanization. It reacts to these parallel shifts by identifying and conceptualizing emerging urban experiments for this exploding demographic. Liberated from the responsibilities of the first and second More

Mirroring Effects: Tales of Territory

Each of the case studies comprising Mirroring Effects: Tales of Territory unfolds as an all too real-life tale chronicling the ramifications of urbanization under the influence of integrated world capitalism. Taken together, they narrate the ongoing restructuring of built and lived spaces in highly diverse regions of what More

Housing Cairo

Focussing on the metropolitan region of Cairo, this research project aims to identify the forces at work – both formal and informal, and combinations thereof – in the production of territory. Over the past decades, Greater Cairo has morphed into an indistinct zone structured by moments of concentration More