At the 20th anniversary of its Urban Design Graduate Program, METU Faculty of Architecture organised an international symposium on urban design on 4-6 October 2016 in Ankara, Turkey. Covering the seven domains of the field, ideology, sociology, bio-ecology, morphology, methodology, pedagogy and praxis under the major title, ‘Designing Urban Design: Towards a Holistic Perspective’, the symposium aimed to provide an overarching and updated view on urban design practice, education and research.
With their keynote speeches; Prof. David Grahame Shane (Columbia University), Prof. Jon Lang (University of New South Wales), Prof. Ali Madanipour (Newcastle University), Prof. Stephen Marshall (University College London), Prof. Tony Hall (Anglia Ruskin University) and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Abeer Elshater (Ain Shams University) has presented a series of inspiring discussions suggesting numerous questions to be researched in future as well.
For the symposium, forty-five papers (out of a hundred applications in total) were selected via the blind-review process that was pursued by forty academics from many World universities. The thematic presentations and debates within the symposium were conducted under the specific titles. Organising the collective debate under these thematic titles essentially enabled the participants to realise a series of focussed discussions on specific issues. By bringing researchers, professionals and educators together, a lively intellectual platform was created to discuss the past, present and future conditions of urban design.
