“Open City” draws a crowd to swissnex Boston
“Open City” draws a crowd to swissnex Boston
On October 20, swissnex Boston hosted “Open City: a lecture by Professor Kees Christiaanse, Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zurich and Program Leader Future Cities Laboratory.” Professor Christiaanse intrigued the audience with his innovative knowledge on the idea of changing cities and how development of cities will evolve in the future.
“On the one hand, we cannot really control the development of our cities: just witness the sprawl of the last half century, the segregation of uses and communities. On the other hand, we can make significant interventions — we can insert new rail lines, we can improve public spaces, as is being done these days in, for instance, New York City…At best these interventions are the result of democratic processes, with stakeholder interests, environmental concerns and social effects all taken into account.”
Providing real life examples of evolving architecture, Professor Christiaanse discussed the ideas of global contemporary processes of urbanization. With over half of the world’s population living in cities in this century, Professor Christiaanse is looking to find a way to solve the challenges of achieving a sustainable method of urban design. To do this, Professor Kees is leading teams within the Architecture and Urban Design program at ETH Zurich that participate in national and international research programs and non-university project collaborations.
In addition to his position at ETH, Professor Kees is one of two program leaders at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. Based in Switzerland, Professor Kees works jointly with nine research module leaders to develop better techniques in the area of Global Environmentally Sustainability.
swissnex Boston was proud to host Professor Kees and provide him with a platform to spread his research and ideas throughout the Boston area.
