Head: Assoc. Prof. Mag.phil. Brigitte Felderer
Advisory Board
2023–2025:
Marije Vogelzang (Dordrecht, Netherlands)
Nasrin Mohiti Asli & Giuseppe Grant from orizzontale
(Rome, Italy)
Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber from Bitter/Weber (Vienna, Austria)
Visiting Artist
WS 2024/25:
Céline Struger
Urban Environment
Today, more than half of the
world population lives in cities, and according to UN reports another 200,000 people arrive each day. In the next 20 years,
cities around the globe will expand by 1.5 million square kilometres and in 25 years two-thirds of the world population will
live in cities. In this global event we can identify the triggering factors behind tremendous restructuring processes: the
transformational power of the industrial and digital revolution. This development places cities as complex, self-generating
environments under enormous pressure. Through the densification and concentration of the population, economy, capital, and
media, as well as culture and knowledge in urban agglomerations, both their spatial and social fabric are subject to overproportional
stress.
Social Design
In order to account for this global development, new concepts are needed
that address the overall process of knowledge production in society. Especially art universities are predestined to formulate
these new, distinct perspectives on the inherent logic of cities and the corresponding dynamics of their processes. Artistic
research can generate links between multifaceted disciplinary expertise and the problems posed by the urban realm. The University
of Applied Arts Vienna (Angewandte) has therefore implemented a new master degree programme dedicated to these challenges
that emerge within urban social systems and the broad spectrum of related issues.
The shaping of reality viewed
on the example of urban agglomerations and contrasted with the urban context of Vienna initially forms both the field of work
and the scale for the realisation of the individual projects.
