Re-Streaming the City: Reformative Policies & Landscape Infrastructures to Adapt to Climate Change

About

The developmental trajectory of urbanization in the region of Volos has diachronically been accompanied by the regulation and taming of the floodplain’s natural landscape. The city’s expansion followed the pattern of a densely arrayed grid that rationally reshaped much of its watercourses to open sewers allowing for the only available public spaces to appear over a segregated network of small green patches summing to a mean ratio of 4sq.m. per inhabitant. Paradoxically, the remarkable and extensive hydrographic network that informs much of Volos’ territory, evades any aspect of cultural and environmental re-appropriation. Still, the city’s steam network relies on an obsolete engineering approach and an outmoded pattern of land -stream development. Recent research on flood risk has unveiled the most blatant indicator for the failing nature of the stream’s hard infrastructure ideal, rendering necessary a new infrastructural synthesis involving technical, environmental and creative interventions to re-establish and heal the relationship between city and stream. This context underlines the scope of “Volos: Re-streaming the city” workshop, involving multidisciplinary research by design and strategic reactionary planning methodologies to develop new policies for the integration of novel stream-city infrastructural prototypes enmeshed to the urban morphology in order to heal the broken relationship with water and watersheds but also respond to developmental and climate change imperatives.

• The tutorials, seminars and lectures will be in English language

STRUCTURE:
• The summer school will include lectures from accredited academics in the field of Infrastructures, Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism as well as seminars for design tools including GIS, Rhinoceros and Illustrator.
• It will involve accredited academics, community groups’ representatives and official representatives from the municipality in the final jury in order to expose the novelty of the research with a wider audience.

ATTENDANCE
Maximum attendance: 30 students

ELIGIBILITY TO PARTICIPATE:

• EXPRESSION OF INTEREST: it will be based on a pre-selection. To secure your attendance please send a short letter of interest (100 words max.) indicating your name, year of study / university, contact details (telephone and email address) together with three images from your design work as an attached two - page - PDF (size

Course leader

Dr Io Carydi, Architect NTUA, Adjunct lecturer PRD UTH

Target group

Undergraduate (3rd year or higher) or Graduate students from the disciplines of agronomy, planning, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and civil engineering

Course aim

• to expand the need for a multidisciplinary thinking and collaboration between different scientific disciplines over current urban issues that involve environmental and developmental parameters
• to introduce novel design methodologies capable to relate natural dynamic environments to current urbanization trends
• to introduce novel representation tools that enable as to exemplify complex and dynamic trends that affect urban planning

Fee info