„Bewildered, the formmaker (…) has to make clearly conceived forms without the possibility of trial and error over time. He has to be encouraged now to think his task through from the beginning, and to ‘create’ the form he is concerned with, for what once took many generations of gradual development“ (Alexander, 1964: Notes on the synthesis of form, p. 4-5)

Currently, rapid population growth and rural-urban migration are putting enormous pressure on urban planning in developing countries: Continuously, new neighborhoods and entire cities have to be built in a minimum of time. These new developments must not only meet the basic need of “save roof over one’s head” but must also be able to ensure secure and sustainable livelihoods for all users of the city. Architects and urban designers must hereby pay particular attention to the spatial morphology of streets, places, and buildings: They persist over long periods of time and the greatly influence the behavior of the urban user.

In the design studio “SynCity 2020”, we will be concerned with planning methods for the design of urban spatial structures. The target will be to develop a computer-based design strategy, which adapts to changing environmental parameters and which integrates the perspective of the urban user. That way, the urban master plan will be synthesized with the help a set of rules that is derived from the lives and interactions of the urban actors, rather than being determined by abstract geometrical concepts. These rules will be generated by combining visibility and walkability analyses (Seminar Computational Urban Analysis) in parametric models (Seminar Algorithmic Architecture and Seminar Generative Urban Models, Jun.-Prof. Dr. R. König).

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