The international competition and symposium “Designing Resilience in Asian Cities (DRIA)” were launched in 2014 by the National University of Singapore to foster a substantive discussion on innovative ideas for enhancing resilience and sustainability in the Asia-Pacific region. This program, connecting ten universities, encourages critical engagement with the challenges of climate protection and urbanization.

For more than ten years, forward-looking architectural and urban planning concepts, as well as innovative technologies, have been developed to strengthen the resilience of urban communities. The competition tasks are addressed annually by the universities and presented at an international symposium. From these design projects and the accompanying scientific reports, numerous insights and suggestions have emerged that have enriched our discussion on resilience.

Participating Universities: National University of Singapore, Cept University (Gujarat, India), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Bangladesh), Institut Teknologi Bandung (Indonesia), RMIT University (Australia), National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), South China University of Technology (Guangzhou, China), Université de Montréal (Canada), Louisiana State University (USA).

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OF-Sites – Schools as Explorative Urban Sites examines schools as key urban spaces beyond their institutional educational function, focusing on specific spatial usage patterns of young people. In the project, adolescents in Offenbach are systematically involved in research and planning processes through co-creative mapping, scenario workshops, and urban walks. The aim is to make their previously marginalised perspectives visible and to use them as a resource for inclusive and resilient urban development.

The project combines cutting-edge research with practice-oriented knowledge transfer within an Open City approach, in order to feed inventions and insights back into the urban public sphere. In this way, OF-Sites contributes to both the theoretical and practical advancement of participatory urban planning, strengthens the innovative capacity of urban transformation processes, and highlights the potential of design as a medium between science, administration, and civil society.

The project is supported by the DATIpilot funding programme of the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and is part of the innovation community Transformation by Design (TraFoDes).

EmergenCITY is an interdisciplinary research consortium involving three universities and 23 departments, complemented by partners from politics, industry, and the City of Science Darmstadt. Its goal is to investigate the resilience of future digital cities—particularly with regard to critical infrastructures and the key role of information and communication technologies (ICT), which increasingly shape both urban systems and private households while also heightening their vulnerability. Against the backdrop of growing risks from natural events, technical or human failure, as well as violence and terrorism, emergenCITY develops foundations, methods, and solutions for “Resilient Digital Cities.” The Department of Urban Design and Development contributes a holistic, networked, and integrative approach that combines technical innovations with socio-spatial instruments and formulates scalable solutions for buildings, neighborhoods, and the city as a whole.

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This DFG Heisenberg funding supports the further development of excellent research and teaching capacities at TU Darmstadt in order to address health issues in urban agglomerations from the perspective of urban design and planning, as well as in interdisciplinary teams with environmental psychologists and neuroscientists.”

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This research collaboration aims to anchor ‘inclusion’ as a key quality in the development of sustainable urban districts. To this end, concepts and fields of action for inclusive urban design are being defined, impulses are provided through good practice examples, and the insights are prepared in an accessible way for use in planning practice. Concrete recommendations for action are being developed for an ongoing urban development process for an ‘inclusive 15-minute district’ around the train station in Biebrich. A previously overlooked lever lies in ‘Design for All,’ an approach that seeks to avoid special or isolated solutions and explores the attractive added value for all people—such as comfort, ease of use, accessibility, and good design. The project is a collaboration between the state capital Wiesbaden, the Urban Design and Planning department at TU Darmstadt, and grauwert, a Hamburg-based consultancy for inclusive and demographic-resilient solutions.

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