Urban Design (M.Sc.) 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 and open process shaped by historical contingencies, various human and non-human agencies, socio-material practices, and spatial imaginaries. The study program Urban Design aims to understand those urban configurations and relevant knowledge(s), thus making them negotiable and tangible to co-produce potentialities to inform urban transformation processes better.
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 and spatial practice and research by accommodating teaching staff and students with backgrounds in architecture, urban planning, urban sociology, anthropology, philosophy, geography, interior design, cultural studies, landscape architecture, and ethnology. What is at stake is to develop a robust analytical and practical framework for urban research, design and practice in engaging with the complex urban issues of our times.
