Towards a Healthy City
#1 The Urban Approach
Friday, 20 September 2019

A collaboration between UNStudio and ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory

Part 1 - Welcome and Introduction

PROGRAMME

Welcome
Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Director, ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, Berlin - 00:00 - 02:25
Dana Behrman, Senior Urban Designer and Head of Urban Unit, UNStudio, Amsterdam - 02:25 - 06:41

Introduction
Miriam Mlecek, Programme Manager, ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, Berlin - 06:41- 10:44
Tanja C. Vollmer, Founder, kopvol - architecture and psychology, Berlin and Rotterdam - 10:45 - 14:44

Part 2 - Lectures 1 & 2 

Lectures
Moderator Gemma Koppen, Architect, Founder kopvol - architecture and psychology, Berlin and Rotterdam - 00:00 - 01:20
Lenneke Vaandrager, Associate Professor Health and Society, Wageningen University, Wageningen - 01:22 - 22:03
Tim Townshend, Professor of Urban Design for Health, Newcastle University - 25:12 - 44:20

Part 3 - Lectures 3 & 4

Jos Boys, Senior Lecturer in Environments for Learning, Bartlett Real Estate Institute, University College London - 01:31 - 23:07
Andreas Malich, Developer, Head of International Campus Berlin Branch, Berlin - 25:50 - 40:09

Part 4 - Panel Discussion

Panel Discussion

moderated by Tanja C. Vollmer, Founder, kopvol - architecture and psychology, Berlin and Rotterdam and Gemma Koppen, Architect, Founder kopvol - architecture and psychology, Berlin and Rotterdam

Peers
Thomas Honeck, International Relations, Berlin State Chancellery
Astrid Piber, Partner and Senior Architect, UNStudio, Amsterdam
Dana Behrman, Senior Urban Designer and Head of Urban Unit, UNStudio, Amsterdam

BACKGROUND
This lab talk was the first in the Towards a Healthy City series and part of the ANCB theme Responsive City. Combining Local Knowledge with Digital Systems. In collaboration with UNStudio, the complexity of the topic was investigated with a panel of interdisciplinary expertise, knowledge, and insights.

The kick-off event #1 The Urban Approach examined the built environment as a holistic factor for health production and optimisation. Its central aim was to take into account implications and challenges of connecting communities, spaces, policies and technology to improve the living conditions and health of citizens and the city.

New angles of collaboration for a future development of healthy cities combined approaches to generate collective (thinking) systems. It is time for developers, city planners, architects, and industry leaders to create new partnerships, and identify what constitutes the 'appropriate effort' to support healthy cities. Designers also need to ask themselves how their designs can incentivize healthier lifestyles. At the same time, it will be important to investigate the ethics of collecting data on user behaviour, and the use of the internet of things, when designing and monitoring these healthy, human-centric environments.

Without using the word 'holistic' or imagining what 'healthy' cities look like, can we design for how cities can make us feel? What they may do for you? What are the outcomes healthy spaces produce, rather than the aesthetics that they reflect? Ultimately, we are interested in exploring research into the production of healthy cities, possiblities of new design and business models, fundamentally re-ordering the priorities of design.