2018-2019 UD502
Regenarative Urbanism: Envisioning New Agents for Planning and Designing Sustainable Spaces
UD 502 Urban Design Studio II focused on the notion of regenerative urbanism (RU) to develop problem-solving design ideas and projects to make places sustainable. In 2019, during the Spring term, the studio teaching team selected this notion as a generic theme, got urban design students familiar with it, and asked them to select a regenerative agent to define and use in their design projects. The design studio became a medium for urban design students to become active specialists, researchers and designers to experience the design process of the urban environment through their design researches and projects. Searching for design outcomes by research and researching through design projects became a learning process for both master students and the teaching team. Cappadocia was selected as the focus of the studio projects. Students produced five major projects individually. Developing an integrated network model for Cappadocia region, an experimental critical regionalism by urban pattern in Uçhisar, creating ludic public space network between the fairy chimneys and daily life realm in Göreme, using water as a regenerative agent and creating a blue-green network in Avanos and exploring an organized complexity in a coherent commercial high street of Avanos are the five major urban design projects, developed by the design teams. We are also thankful to our jury members, who kindly discussed our design projects’ pros and cons and gave tremendous feedback to our projects during the field trip in Cappadocia and afterwards. Last, students informed us that they were particularly challenged with the workload when they developed urban design projects individually.
Studio instructors: Müge Akkar Ercan (coordinator), Cansu Canaran (part-time instructor), Selen Karadoğan (research assistant)
Students: Sabrina Shurdhi, Tuğçe Sözer, Yasemen Kaya, Yasin Yağız Kaya, Zeynep Elif Kar