Territorial Urbanism Now!

What if urban planning and design were to prioritize rather than merely accommodate the unbuilt environment? Territorial Urbanism Now! calls for a paradigm shift in the conception of urban transformation. It urges us to favor sustainable systems in order to collectively tackle the challenges of climate change. Until now, urban planning and design professionals have integrated green and active mobility systems in the residual spaces available. In the reverse approach envisioned here, these systems become structuring elements of the territory, supported by a much more frugal built environment.

The contributions by urbanists, artists, architects, and landscape architects in this publication come from research, practice, and teaching. Paola Viganò, Eric Luiten, Sandra Guinand-in conversation with Ali Madanipour, Chris Younès, Christian Schmid, Eric Wieërs, and Maarten Van Acker-Stefan Rettich, Tommaso Pietropolli, Elena Andonova, Julio de la Fuente, Natalia Gutiérrez, Ward Verbakel, Claudia Bode, Philipp Misselwitz, Davide Curatola Soprana, Beatrice Galimberti, Lilli Licka, Hannes Gröblacher, Johannes Bernsteiner, Stefan Devoldere, Anselm Wagner, Susanne Eliasson, Eva Pfannes, Jesse Honsa, and Stefan Bendiks not only introduce a much-needed paradigm shift, but also show us the premises for its realization.

Aglaée Degros is a professor at and head of the Institute of Urbanism at Graz University of Technology, as well as an honorary science fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. In 2001, together with Stefan Bendiks, she founded the Artgineering urban planning agency. Aglaée Degros is co-author of books such as Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe, Traffic Space is Public Space, Territorial Justice, Basics of Urbanism, and, more recently, Towards Territorial Transition. Eva Schwab is a landscape architect, post-doctoral university assistant, and deputy head of the Institute of Urbanism at Graz University of Technology. In 2015 she received her doctorate summa cum laude in landscape planning and landscape architecture from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna and won the Landscape Research Dissertation Award. Together with Aglaée Degros she co-authored and co-edited Territorial Justice as well as Basics of Urbanism Radostina Radulova-Stahmer has been working as a university assistant at the Institute of Urbanism at the Graz University of Technology 2017. She completed her dissertation at KIT/TU Graz in 2022. Anna Bagari- has been a university assistant at the Institute of Urbanism at the Graz University of Technology since 2019; Sabine Bauer and Jennifer Fauster since 2020; and Mario Stefan since 2023. They have been involved in the two conferences that form the basis for the publication of Territorial Urbanism Now!