Urban Form, (In)Equality and (In)Justice: Research and Education

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Within the Erasmus+ international research project titled “EPUM Emerging Perspectives on Urban Morphologies” which seeks to explore complementarities in urban form approaches in order to enrich our understanding of the city, this event brought together educators, students and professionals from various disciplines, to reflect on the relation between how different forms of (in)justice and (in)equality are spatially inscribed in the city and how architects and planners conceive and produce urban form. It engaged with urban form as a political and social arena, centring its investigation on plural relations between urban form and lived space. This approach provides conceptual and empirical framework for researching complexity and many contingencies of socially produced urban space. This means that the urban fabric materializes not only by design and construction in various degrees of regulation and (in)formality, but also through the settling of plural dimensions of mundane everyday life, political struggle, cultural expression, as well as visible and invisible structural (pre)conditions. How are (in)justice and (in)equality inscribed in urban form? What are the agents, practices and processes that produce equality and justice? How can different analytical and design approaches illuminate and contest injustice and inequality as matters of concern? How can open learning curriculum and open education resources for teaching urban form build the capacity for more inclusive city-making? Learning objectives and tasks of a multidisciplinary open learning approach of the EPUM project were introduced to stimulate discussion. The event featured a keynote lecture, formats stimulating an exchange with invited speakers and a poster exhibition of Master and PhD students from Austria’s academic institutions entered for a prize.​

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