Background

Cities have always been places where contradictions and conflicts are most visible, and where forces of development and potential solutions converge. Influential ideas concerning architecture, urban design, and town planning that developed during the inter-war and post-war period—shaped by extreme political, social, and economic transformations—still dominate the way much of the academy thinks about housing today. But it is also clear that over time many alternative views have entered the debate, often from local or vernacular sources, concerning issues of quality standards, norms, and other dimensions that affect the way practitioners understand and design living quarters in low-income areas. All of these developments demand reassessment under the pressures of the large influx of people in cities in developing regions, as they do in developed cities, where refugees and other migrants strain the built environment and the design profession’s capacity to deliver solutions that promise a real impact.

This colloquium will address the issues and phenomena resulting from these processes as they relate to accessibility and distribution of land, including attendant issues of planning, participation, communication, infrastructure, sharing, and ideating. Inviting PhD students and Post-docs from interdisciplinary modes of thinking, the colloquium aims to develop new frameworks of understanding emerging problems, as well as propose potential solutions for them.

The event will be linked to the ETH Forum Wohnungsbau 2019, occuring the day before, on 05 April 2019, and bringing together internationally renowned experts and practicioners. Among other distinguished guests, these experts will serve as moderators and guest critics for the thematic track presentations during the Doctoral Colloquium.

This Colloquium will be part of a conference series organised in collaboration with the the Hub on Informal Urbanism of UNI (UN-Habitat’s Partnership with Universities Worldwide) and supported by the ISTP (Institute of Science, Technology and Policy), D-ARCH (Faculty of Architecture of ETH Zurich, Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Profs. Alfredo Brillembourg & Hubert Klumpner) and NSL (Network City and Landscape). The series began in Munich in 2011 with "Metropolis Nonformal - Landscape, Infrastructure and Urbanism in the Global South" and was followed by conferences in 2013 and 2014 in Munich and Cairo, respectively, and most recently, the "No-Cost Housing Conference" in Zürich.

Prof. Hubert Klumpner

Zurich, November 2018