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A. Psenner:
"Teaching Urban Morphology";
Talk: International Urban Studies Conference on CARE - Cities, Action, Research and Education, TU Wien; 2019-11-20 - 2019-11-22.

All around the First World, the cities of the 19th century experienced a major wave of industrialization and urbanization. The technical and medical achievements of that time led to a greater population surviva¬bility, to regional demographic peaks, and - supported by the prevailing political situations - to an unprecedented rural exodus. Also did the technical inventions and political shifts of that time fundamentally change the established social order.
Interestingly, urban planning and architecture responded to what was happening globally with similar means: the gridded urban structure, the emergence of public transport, the rise of social housing, the boosting of housing in general and - somewhat surprisingly - a strongly historicizing architectural language. This historicizing aspect is thematised and analysed in countless treatises, but to date little or no attention has been paid to the urban planning aspect of this style epoch.

The Gründerzeit style, en vogue in the Austrian monarchy, in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb; the architecture d'entrepreneur in Haussmann´s Paris; the Wilhelminian architecture in Hobrecht´s Berlin and Barcelona's Pla Cerda - shall they be seen as facets of the same - and maybe first - global city planning approach? Was the similarity in the town planning approach led by the first World Fairs and exhibitions or the upcoming "Städtebau" manuals and other journal publications? In which way do the implementations of national urban design strategies of that time differ and where did the institutionalisation of town planning lead to similar outcomes?

The aim of my diploma teaching is to promote a broad, critical, and comparative analysis of the history and the manifestation on the construction of the cities around the First World, by analysing the process from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective and also by playing back research achievements of my own research project (StadtParterre, Wien) into applied teaching - and vice versa.

In my AnOther Roundtable input I will explain the aim of my teaching and illustrate how our diploma seminar works: over the past two years my highly motivated young colleagues have researched the cities of Barcelona, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Rome, Basel and Berlin and they also have been awarded with five KuWi scholarships, which allow them to deepen their studies on the spot (in the cities to be investigated) and also to network throughout Europe.

Urban Planning; Morphology; Teaching; Urban Planning Research