Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from October, 2012

Urban Design Studio: Suburban Retrofit in Denmark

This fall, my studio course is with Richard Plunz, head of the Urban Design program here at Columbia, and our subject is "Aalborg, Denmark: New Paradigms for Global Suburbanization."  I spent the past week in Aalborg at the invitation of the municipality as part of the Urban Design Studio collaborative workshop between the University of Aalborg and Columbia University.  Together with 30 international students in various planning and management fields, the fifteen of us from Columbia (architects, engineers, and urban planners) researched the suburban fabric of East Aalborg and brainstormed solutions to problems of social isolation, inadequate housing stock, lack of accessibility, unemployment, and environmental impact.  In teams of 8 or 9, we developed strategies to address one or more of these problems using urban design, architecture, and planning interventions. My group's theme was "sustainable business," which we tackled by proposing a distribute