Architecture in Context - Developing Urban Living Environments Beyond the Master Plan and Facade Discussion

Architecture brings together, in a wide range of specific types of buildings with different functions, complex criteria such as perception, experience, understanding, imagination, and planning, especially within the polymorphic conglomerations that we call a city. It is only those who use a building and live in it that make it “complete”, which is particularly true with regard to cities and urban living: the city as a “communal living space”, but also as a multilayered infrastructural system with technical, social, political, cultural, esthetic, and ethical components. Therefore the publication is primarily oriented towards objectives, strategies, and methods for the further development of the city, on different levels and scales. Local, regional, national, and international concepts that can be regarded as innovative or alternative are central. The focus of the content is especially on structural, as well as design sustainability, on unexploited potential, on the planning of the unplannable. Architecture and urban development, public spaces and mobility are observed and analyzed, as wide-ranging and comprehensive urban development subjects, which also always incorporate a social dimension.