Urban Climate Adaptation in Landscape Architecture Design Studios

The adaptation of cities to existing problems such as urban heat islands and to the expected effects of climate change asks for new focuses in urban design professions. Especially for landscape architects, many new assignments will occur within climate adaptation, because the ‘materials’ they work with, such as vegetation and water, have great impact on urban climates. Therefore future landscape architects need to be provided with the necessary knowledge about climate adaptation methods. In that light, we have introduced case-study oriented design studios that focus on urban climate adaptation. The didactic structure of the studio included several steps: scientific climate knowledge acquisition by literature study, deriving design guidelines from the literature, urban climate analysis of the case- city on different scale levels, response to analysis results through design on different scale levels. The studios were conducted in close cooperation with stakeholders from the municipalities (policy makers and urban planners) of case-study cities. In general, the teaching experiences show that climate-responsive design poses intellectual challenges for students due to its complexity. But it also occurred that climate-responsive design can trigger student’s creativity. The stakeholders were generally very appreciative of the studio work and the design visualizations helped them to imagine what urban design for climate can mean. So, the design works have brought very abstract urban climate knowledge closer to imaginable realities of policy makers and urban planners and thus- closer to implementation of climate adaptation