Urbanism
The more than 100 members of the Urbanism department are united in contributing to the Urbanism mission, namely to advance, share and apply knowledge on how the built environment interacts with humans and their behaviour, and how design, planning and engineering interventions in this built environment can better satisfy human and societal needs. Here, ‘advance’ refers to our research, ‘share’ to our education and dissemination, and ‘apply’ to our conviction that Urbanism needs to be an action-oriented, forward looking practice.
Operating within a broader context characterised by environmental, climate, socio-cultural, demographic, technological and economic change, our research focuses on the interaction between people, places and plans. Below, we first describe these cornerstones of this Urbanism Triangle, before turning to what connects them, which can be described as ‘research on design’, ‘research through design’ and ‘research for design’. This three-fold classification broadly represents the three research strands of our research. The different disciplines constituting urbanism place a different emphasis on parts of this triangle, while also bringing their distinct disciplinary epistemology and methodology, tools and traditions to the table. Together, they provide an in-depth understanding of how (spatial) design, planning and engineering can optimise our built environment according to our needs.