Our colleague Alessandra Sammartino joined the Bucerius Summer School Lab Talk at Aedes as a speaker, bringing TSPA’s planning and design perspective to the discussion on urban resilience.
Together with Lawrence Schätzle from the Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik (Difu), students from the Bucerius Summer School and members of the public, we explored how design and planning can support resilience through integrated thinking, coordination and collective action.
We discussed how planning around resources such as water and air requires us to work across both sectors and jurisdictions, bringing different disciplines and institutions together around interconnected systems - and how plans can provide a strategic framework for coordinating actors and investment priorities.
This also means looking beyond resilience as preparation for exceptional events. Strengthening everyday urban systems and services builds capacities that cities can draw on when crises occur. In this sense, resilience, sustainability and quality of life are not separate agendas.
We reflected on how sometimes the challenge is not developing the most sophisticated tools, but creating the right space for decision-makers to work together.
And how resilient cities need resilient institutions: capacity building creates lasting value only when institutional memory is retained and knowledge remains accessible after a project ends.
“At the centre of the discussion was a simple idea: design as a process that creates space for dialogue, makes ambitions Political, builds ownership, and acts as a platform for collective action.
