ISTP News

A recent study conducted as part of the ISTP research project Co-Creating Mobility Hubs has shed new light on resident preferences in the transformation of railway stations. The findings, published in the journal European Planning Studies, highlight the significance of railway stations as integral components of local communities.  

Densification is fundamental to urban planning and development but often encounters local resistance. A group of ETH researchers, including ISTP member Prof. David Kaufmann, have investigated factors that might influence public acceptance of densification.

Often research can be difficult to understand or inaccessible. The Urban Research Incubator’s new interactive 3D website allows a broad audience to learn about segregation in cities and how infrastructure can affect sociospatial mobility with visual renderings.

The residents of the PJS Informal Settlement in Cape Town have faced safety challenges at night as they did not have enough light from high-mast lights. ISTP researchers Yael and Stephanie changed this together with many locals and partners. By installing solar public lights, people in the settlement felt safer and could fulfil basic needs at night. 

ISTP member Prof. Kay Axhausen spoke about possible solutions to the traffic jams during winter season through the Prättigau (GR) in an interview with Radio SRF 1. He gives his opinion about congestion tolls, construction measures and ways to improve public transport services. 

How does urban design become consciously mobilized as a technology of security politics, and how does a reflexive perspective on this use offers productive research avenues? Focusing on the two case studies of Bogotá and Zürich, former ISTP researcher Jonas Hagmann and ISTP PhD candidate David Kostenwein provide new insights into these topics.

Taking Bogotá with its 3,500 gated communities as his case study, ISTP PhD Candidate David Kostenwein created a novel typology focusing on the gated community’s spatial dimension. He portrays it as an integral part of the urban realm as opposed to an isolated island.

ISTP PhD Candidate Michael Walczak assessed Switzerland's spatial policy which rejects the use of new land in favour of promoting densification. Using the agglomeration of Lausanne as a case study, he applied an automated spatial policy model to assess building reserves that are still available within the current building regulatory framework.

In collaboration with SECO, the virtual  "Urban Development Round Table," which took place on Tuesday, November 10, brought together some of the world's major players and funders of urban development, including the World Bank, the Cities Alliance, the Cities Development Initiative for Asia, and IDB. Reaching out beyond academia, Prof. Hubert Klumpner and Michael Walczak had a chance to explore how to devise collaborative solutions to the most pressing urban challenges.

Adequate responses to city-​making and the production of inclusive environments are needed to tackle the segregated landscape and structural challenges in South Africa's young democracy that cannot be generated by one theoretical framework alone. In our upcoming colloquium, Anne Graupner, co-founder of 26´10 south Architects, talks about a unique mode of thinking that led to intertwining theory and practice, the co-production of knowledge and capacity building.

The Department of Architecture (D-ARCH) of the ETHZ and VELUX STIFTUNG are launching two postdoctoral positions for 18 months in researching daylight perspectives in sustainable urban and architectural Design. The first DAYLIGHT Fellow will start by January 2021 and the second Fellow by February 2022.

As urban populations boom, homelessness is rising. While governments and property developers struggle to provide answers, some residents are taking matters into their own hands, by constructing buildings that are rising higher into skylines. And now, some leading architects are redefining their own role from designing buildings to offering guidance for eclectic self-build projects. ETH Prof. Hubert Klumpner believes that city  "relics" should be seen as opportunities for resettlement.

Architects and urban designers are currently developing new concepts and tools to comply with the participatory design approach emerging. Urban Research Incubator researchers Michael Walczak & David M. Kretzer are investigating innovative lighting approaches and their performance in Bogotá, co-created with informal settlement dwellers and tested with Colombian policy-makers. Their work is hosted by the Network City and Landscape Newsletter addressing the topic of "Participation".

With guests including Ambassador Raymond Furrer (State Secretariat for Economic Affairs - SECO), this event, which takes place from Thursday, 19. March to Saturday, 21. March 2020, will inaugurate the newest building emerging from the research of the Klumpner Chair – the Fábrica de Cultura: BAQ, in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Learn more about an ISTP Exhibition in the Architecture Museum in Bogota on the Island City, the City of Fences and Gated Communities starting on Tuesday, 29 August 2019.

ISTP PhD student David Kretzer analysis public lighting approaches in the Colombian capital city of Bogotá.