Events | Symposium with Friederike Meyer: "Pandemic Urbanism"
Online | May 29, 2020
Pandemic Urbanism: A virtual symposium on COVID-19 and cities
What does COVID-19 mean for city life? What are the implications of this pandemic for urban mobility, sociability, politics, and density? With more than 50 participants, the symposium offers a full day of presentations and discussion from academics, researchers, practitioners, and activists sharing new ideas about cities during COVID-19. Thomas Mann Fellow Friederike Meyer will give her presentation at the Pandemic Urbanism Symposium in a session titled “Urban Form Beyond the Norm,” from 10:15 – 11:15 AM on May 29, 2020, coauthored by Thomas Mann Fellow Doris Kleilein.
Density, Mobility and Common Good – Towards the Post Corona City
The pandemic reveals the advantages of robust and resilient cities as well as the consequences of insufficient or nonexistent urban planning. The collective experience in the state of emergency provides a chance to accelerate long-overdue demands and concepts for the climate-neutral city in its consequent implementation.
Everything that makes cities worth living in also helps in a crisis like this: a climate-friendly active mobility, flexible spatial models for living and working, affordable housing, sufficient public space, regional economic cycles, inclusive neighborhoods and a well-organized administration. Resiliency depends on how density is organized and designed.
Facing climate change, the dense, mixed-use city is more than ever an answer to the global dilemma of more and more people having to share resources and spaces that are coming to an end. Based on built and proposed projects from Berlin and other European cities, the lecture will outline in which areas the crisis can be a catalyst for urban development towards the common good and what political action needs to be taken.
Friederike Meyer, born 1972 in Dresden, studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen and as a DAAD scholarship holder at the University of Washington in Seattle. She also trained as a journalist at the Evangelische Medienakademie in Berlin. Today, she works as an architecture journalist in Berlin. She is interested in the intersection of architecture, urban planning and society. From 2000 to 2017 she was editor of the architecture journal Bauwelt; for several years she has been working as an author for exhibitions and books, moderator and juror. She teaches architectural communication in Kaiserslautern. Friederike Meyer has been editor-in-chief of the newsroom of BauNetz since 2017.
Location
Friday, May 29, 2020, 9am – 5pm PDT
This event is free and open to all. Registration is required.
Link for remote participation will be provided to registrants.
Organized by current and recent University of Washington doctoral students, with support from the College of Built Environments, the PhD Program in the Built Environment and the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning.
