The transformation from an agricultural to an industrialized society currently taking place in Ethiopia is characterized by fundamental changes in the country's rural and urban areas. The Ethiopian government's "Growth and Transformation Plan" envisages the development of numerous small towns. The supply of water, food, energy and social and transport infrastructure is to serve as the basis for increasing prosperity through economic growth and lead to greater security of supply.

For sustainable development of these new cities, consideration of resource and people flows within the urban system is critical, as these will determine the urban footprint of future urban systems - and thus intrinsic factors such as mobility and transportation at the city and regional levels.

In the study project, students learned how spatial implications and urban morphology relate to resource and people flows, applied parametric tools and methods for spatial analysis, and transferred them to simulate urban development scenarios. Each student group thereby worked on one case study, a small village in rural Ethiopia, in which a new school shall be the seed for the future urban development.