Transformers - Steering Urban Transition towards Sustainability and Resilience

Abstract

Understanding urban change and orienting, organising, and steering transition towards sustainability and resilience is seen as a major trajectory for innovating research in architecture and urbanism. A focus on transdisciplinary approaches, interdisciplinary cooperation and the inclusion of experts and stakeholders from cities opens novel pathways to advance knowledge which is immanently transformative. The project and book TRANSFORMERS organises an international platform to discuss and advance research about urban transition between Germany and Italy, with the purpose to blend spatial, processual, and creative-cultural approaches in architecture and urbanism. Its focus is on the role and agency of cities to reach climate neutrality, combining this change with social and economic progress, exploring interrelation and dynamics between urban fabric and society. TRANSFORMERS as collaboration between researchers from Leibniz University Hannover, the University of Palermo, and the Polytechnic University of Marche establishes a joint search for new transformative knowledge, for cities as laboratories of openness, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It builds on recent research in Italy and Germany and cooperates with the cities Sambuca di Sicilia and Jesi (Italy) and initiatives in Hannover (Germany) as case studies and as stages for new formats of open science in communication and involvement. TRANSFORMERS has been funded by DAAD German Academic Exchange Service as University Dialogue between Germany and Southern Europe.