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Quality of Life: Livability in Future Cities


ETH

About this course

Cities are becoming the predominant living and working environment of humanity, and for this reason, livability or quality of life in the city has become crucial.

This urban planning course will focus on four areas that directly affect livability in a city: Urban energy, urban climate, urban ecology and urban mobility. The course begins by presenting measurable criteria for the assessment of livability, and how to positively influence the design of cities towards greater livability. We will focus on this basic topic of the human habitat in a holistic way, and introduce possibilities of participatory urban design by citizens, leading towards the development of a citizen design science.

You will be able to share your experiences with the other participants in the course and also with the experts from the teaching team. In completing this course, you will better understand how to make a city more livable by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different properties and impact factors of the urban system.

Requirements

Livability in Future Cities is the second course in a series of MOOCs under the title “Future Cities.” This series aims to bring the latest research on planning, managing and transforming cities to places where this knowledge has the highest benefit for its citizens. “Future Cities” provided an overview, and this course will focus on livability in existing and new cities. 

Course Staff

Gerhard Schmitt

Gerhard Schmitt

Professor of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich

Gerhard Schmitt is Professor of Information Architecture at ETH Zurich, leader of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Simulation Platform and Principal Investigator in BigData-Informed Urban Design of the Future Cities Laboratory 2, Founding Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore, and ETH Zurich Senior Vice President for ETH Global. His research focuses on urban simulation, Smart Cities and linking Big Data with Urban Design. From 1998-2008 he served as Vice President for Planning and Logistics and Member of the Board of ETH Zurich. He directed the development of ETH’s strategy and planning in cooperation with the 16 scientific departments. From 1984 to 1988 he conducted CAAD research and teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. He was Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Technical University of Denmark and at the Technical University of Delft. From 2004-2007 he chaired the Visiting Committee of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and initiated ETH Science City.

Peter Edwards

Peter Edwards

Director of the Singapore-ETH Center, ETH Zurich

 

Peter Edwards is director of the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability. An ecologist by training, he obtained his Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University for a study on nutrient cycling in tropical rain forest. In 1993 he was appointed professor of plant ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where he also served as dean of the Department of Environmental Systems Science. Peter a strong interest in the application of science and technology for better policy and management. He was a member of the executive board of the Alliance for Global Sustainability, a research partnership between several leading universities. He continues his own research into the environmental benefits of urban greenery.

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs

Professor of Urban Studies, ETH Zurich

 

Professor Jacobs’ received her undergraduate and Masters’ training in Human Geography from the University of Adelaide, Australia. She completed her PhD at University College London. Prior to joining Yale-NUS College, Professor Jacobs taught at University College London from 1989 to 1991, The University of Melbourne from 1992 to 2002, The University of Edinburgh from 2002 to 2010, and the National University Singapore in 2011. She was a founding member of Melbourne’s Institute of Postcolonial Studies, and served a term as its Director. Professor Jacobs has supervised more than 15 PhD students, and has been on the editorial team of various journals, including the Geographical Research, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Scottish Geographical Journal, Cultural Studies Review, Social and Cultural Geographies, Transactions IBG (NS), Gender, Place and Culture, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Antipode. Sharing the same name as urban scholar Jane Jacobs, who authored the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Professor Jacobs has become an expert in professional disambiguation.

Stephen Cairns

Stephen Cairns

Scientific Directory of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory, ETH Zurich

 

Stephen Cairns completed his undergraduate degree in anthropology and classical studies at the University of Otago. He trained in architecture at the University of Auckland, and practiced as an architect in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific, designing the competition-winning entry for the Headquarters for the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Noumea. He subsequently undertook doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne writing a thesis on the colonial architecture in Java, with an emphasis on aesthetics and the politics of representation. On completion of his PhD he was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Melbourne. He took up a Senior Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh, and was appointed Professor of Architecture and Urbanism there in 2009. He served as Head of Department of Architecture, and Director of the newly founded Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He is currently based in Singapore where he is Scientific Director of the Future Cities Laboratory.

Jan Carmeliet

Jan Carmeliet

Professor of Building Physics, ETH Zurich

Since June 2008, Jan Carmeliet is full professor at the Chair of Building Physics at ETH Zürich and head of the Laboratory of Multiscale studies in Building Physics of EMPA, Dübendorf (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology), Switzerland. Jan Carmeliet, graduated from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) in Engineering Architecture and earned his PhD in Civil Engineering at K.U.Leuven in 1992. He has been Assistant (1998), Associate (2001) and Full professor (2004) at K.U.Leuven and part-time Professor at T.U.Eindhoven (2001-2008). He was in 2007 on sabbatical leave at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and at Los Alamos Governmental Laboratories. His research resulted until now in 191 scientific journal papers. His research interests concern multiscale behaviour of porous and granular materials, heat-air-moisture flow in the urban environment and energy systems at building and urban scale. Research is based on advanced computational modelling (atomistic, discrete element, lattice Boltzmann, CFD, FEM) and advanced experimental techniques (X-ray and Neutron Tomography,…) and time-resolved imaging in wind and water tunnels (PIV, …). He is member of the research commission of ETH Zürich, of the Board of Energy Science Centre ETH Zürich, of the scientific commission of the CCEM (Centre of Competence Energy and Mobility), expert of the Commission of Technology and Innovation Switzerland (CTI/engineering), graduate program director ‘master integrated building systems’ at ETHZ and Coordinator of the SCCER-efficiency (Swiss Centre of Competence of Energy Research).

Matthias Roth

Matthias Roth

Associate Professor of Geography, National University of Singapore

Matthias Roth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD degree from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada). His research examines how land-use changes affect local climates with a particular focus on the climate of cities. He has held past academic appointments in Canada and Japan and was a Visiting Professor/Researcher at ETH and EPFL (Switzerland), ASU (USA) and Monash University (Australia). He is Past President of the International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC) and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Climatology. He is currently Deputy Head of the Department of Geography and Deputy Director of the NUS Bachelor of Environmental Studies programme.

Alex Erath

Alex Erath

Postdoctoral Fellow, ETH Future Cities Laboratory

Dr. Alex Erath is currently a senior researcher at the NRF funded Future Cities Laboratory. As research module coordinator (Deputy PI), he manages the research module on Mobility and Transportation Planning and lead in this role the implementation and further development of the large-scale, agent-based transport demand model MATSim Singapore. He obtained his PhD in 2011 from ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) where he studied the vulnerability of transport infrastructure. His main research interests are multi-agent, activity-based transport demand modeling, the interaction between transport infrastructure and the built environment as well as travel behaviour modeling. In this domain, he was involved various studies with a focus on stated preference surveys and led a project on long-term fuel price elasticity that featured stated adaptation face-to-face interviews.

Matthias Berger

Matthias Berger

Senior Researcher, ETH Future Cities Laboratory

Dr. Matthias Berger is Senior Researcher and Module Coordinator of the Simulation Platform Module IX at the Future Cities Laboratory in the Singapore-ETH Centre, working in Singapore since 2011. The research focus is simulation and visualization of energy-related issues of urban environments. Dr. Berger received the Dipl.-Ing. in Electrical Engineering from the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in 2006. He joined the High Voltage Laboratory of ETH Zurich (2006 - 2011) where his PhD was dedicated to modeling and optimization of multiple energy carrier systems. His practical experiences include working as a project coordinator for Seed Sustainability (2007 - 2008) as well as R&D at EADS Space Transportation and EADS Astrium (2005 - 2006).

Ulrike Wissen Hayek

Ulrike Wissen Hayek

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich

Dr. Ulrike Wissen Hayek is Senior Scientist and Lecturer at the Chair Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems (PLUS) at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) since 2012. She holds a PhD from the ETH Zurich, a diploma in Landscape Architecture and Planning from the Technical University of Munich (Germany), and she is a trained landscaper. Her key research focuses on the assessment and management of landscape change, GIS-based 3D landscape visualization, and transdisciplinary planning studies. Recently she managed the project “Sustainable Urban Patterns (SUPat)” funded by the Swiss National Research Program 65 “New Urban Quality” that resulted in a collaborative platform and tools suitable to foster a better understanding of the interconnected dynamics of the urban landscape systems.

Estefania Tapias

Estefania Tapias

Postdoctoral fellow and Lecturer, Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich

Estefania Tapias is Postdoctoral fellow and Lecturer at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich. Her research is focus on Information Cities and climate-sensitive urban planning. Estefania attained her doctoral degree at ETH Zurich and obtained the PhD label from Climate-KIC; one of three Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) created by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). At ETH Zurich she teaches the course ‘Digital Urban Simulation’ where ETH students learn how to analyse and generate spatial urban configurations with advanced computational methods.

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