Urban Design

Urban Design Master Program at HafenCity University addresses the interrelated and complex ecological, political, and spatial issues and challenges of contemporary urban life by critically analyzing their entangled state(s); and creatively engaging with the potential of design in responding to them.

Urban Design prioritizes approaches to the urban as a relationally developed and continuously re/produced open process shaped by historical contingencies, various human and non-human agencies, sociomaterial practices, and spatial imaginaries. The study program aims to understand the complex urban configurations and their relevant knowledge(s), thus making them negotiable and tangible for socially and ecologically just urban transformation processes.

Urban Design approaches to design(ing) as a co-produced and care-full practice that not only emerges through individual capacities (of specific disciplines or actors) but also through mediated interrelations and dependencies unfolding in and through urban everyday spaces. Thus, Urban Design orchestrates
trans- and inter-disciplinary knowledge production in urban research and practice by accommodating teaching staff and students from social sciences, architecture and design, philosophy, and cultural studies backgrounds; and collaborating with various local actors in live projects. What is at stake is to develop a robust analytical and practical framework for urban research and practice in engaging with the complex urban issues of our times.